ICT Development and Business Process Modelling in the Legal Domain: The Experience of e-CODEX

Abstract

In the last 30 years, the use of ICT spread into the justice sector with the aim of improving performances and reducing costs. While the justice domain has many distinctive features that makes ICT development and deployment particularly complex compared to other domains, design techniques and methods that proved to be successful in the broader ICT world, have been more and more introduced and tested in this difficult environment. This paper focuses on Business and Process Modelling (BPM) methodology, as a way to navigate the legal, organizational and social complexity of developing e-Justice services. First born for the analysis and improvement of private business processes through the use of graphical representations, the methodology has been largely utilized also for software design in complex organizations. After introducing the main literature on the BPM, we present the case of e-CODEX EU co-funded project, which developed an e-delivery platform to allow secure cross border exchange of judicial documents. The analysis allows grasping some of the strengths and limits of this method, and to learn important lessons on the relationship between BPMs’ use and the legal performativity of e-justice.