Leveraging the information assets of justice

The Justice Ministry employs more than 73,000 people with a budget of 7.1 billion euros. It manages judicial services, prison administration and legal protection of the young. In 2006, following enactment of the Organic Law relating to the Finance Laws (LOLF), the ministry started a major performance-management programme. The project, named Pharos, covers the legal framework.

The Justice Ministry wanted to transform the announced cut in its budgets into an opportunity to work more efficiently.

With the implementation of Pharos, 800 users are in a position to define their objectives and measure their results by using activity, performance and consumption of resource indicators. In practical terms, they can:

• Report information monthly (dashboards for jurisdictions, judicial regions at national level), annually (for example annual performance reports) or on demand (visit by the Minister for Justice, monograph of jurisdictions and responsibilities)
• Analyse costs and performance over time in all departments
• Have available, for management discussion, documents that are shared or used for comparison in order to allocate resources as well as possible.

Pharos is now the official tool for management dialogue at the Justice ministry. New data sources are added regularly. Thus Chorus, the State budgetary and accounting management system, were integrated in 2010.