Smarter working is a hot topic at the moment. Earlier in the week, I wrote about Don Tapscott’s view on the virtues of social collaborative working, following on from his interesting video, here.

And now that the ink has barely dried on that blog, a former deputy commissioner of the Metropolitan Police is arguing for a similar approach for streamlining the Criminal Justice System, in this video.

Former deputy commissioner Tim Goodwin is now a senior executive with Accenture, the global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company.

In the video, he speaks about his experiences of CJS around the London riots, and how the justice process was accelerated with new technology to accommodate the number of related cases being heard – for instance virtual courtrooms.

He then goes on to speak about the need to streamline Criminal Justice going forward, using new technologies and new ways of working to accomplish this.

His central idea is that to speed up the justice process requires a closer working relationship between all the relevant agencies to streamline the bureaucracy.  The example he gives – perhaps not the most popular one at the moment – is the banking system having moved to an effectively paperless environment – so why not justice?

However, bringing the agencies together while ensuring the needs of justice are met will require finding new ways of working, using technology to its best advantage.

Mr Goodwin says: “It requires technology that needs to be procured, it has to be bought in and when you’ve got a contract that the court service have got with one company, the crown prosecutors or the prosecution service with another, when you’ve got the police having different contracts, it’s very hard to work through – how can you do that within the OJEU rules. And so there is a challenge for the private sector.”

Watch the video – which ever way you look at it, new ways of working and collaborative thinking are the way forward. And the technology to enable it already exists.