Question

Like many other professional fields, the justice field has been impacted by the development and advancement of technology, but not without challenges. Two challenges justice agencies face regarding acquiring and implementing new technology are:

• funding the added technology
• getting the practitioners “buy in” to the new technology

Discuss how these two challenges are related, how they differ, and what makes them so challenging to overcome. Which of the two is the more challenging and why? Justify your reasoning.

Answer 1

The use of technology in the justice field is basically about using technology to streamline the legal system and also to ensure that errors in the whole judicial and enforcement system is minimized.

The challenge of funding the technology and getting practitioner's "buyin" is related in the sense that if there is a wide scale acceptability of the technology, then it is definitely easier to get funding for the technology from government and other institutions. The crucial difference is that while funding may be due to financial constraint, getting use "buyin" may be due to reluctance of the user to adapt and also due to certain insecurities inspite of the superior efficacy if the technological intervention.

Out of both the constraints, the more challenging is definitely getting user "buy in" since it deals with breaking and overcoming user's preconceived notions and convincing them to be flexible and receptive towards new technology.