Commissioners press IT for fix after Odyssey reporting failures delay OCA submissions

Dallas County commissioners pressed IT and court managers on Tuesday for a concrete plan to restore routine reporting after the county’s Odyssey case-management implementation failed to produce complete Office of Court Administration (OCA) reports.

Mister Fitzsimmons (court IT) and other staff told the court that invalid data entries in Odyssey prevent automated OCA reporting; they said ad-hoc scripts and manual cleanup have reduced invalids from a much larger backlog but that several thousand invalid records remain and October data is not yet posted. "We had 22,000 (invalids) and scripts knocked out at least 10,000," one staff member said; a subsequent count referenced roughly 13,000 invalids remaining as a recent estimate.

County database staff proposed SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) reports as a plan B to extract usable counts from the SQL Server database while business‑rule validation is resolved. Fitzsimmons said he needs a prioritized IT project resource and a project manager to produce repeatable reports and to hand off routine runs to staff.

Commissioners repeatedly asked for a named lead and a timeline. The court assigned responsibility to county staff to follow up and asked that the elected official and IT coordinate to ensure the manual teams provided by County Clerk Warren can complete data cleanup. "We need to be working on two fronts — clean up invalids and continue to report using the system," a commissioner said. Staff agreed to return in two weeks with a fuller status report and an estimate on how long cleanup will take.

The discussion underscored statutory reporting obligations and the operational consequences for downstream county functions that rely on OCA data. The court also noted the expense already invested in Odyssey and emphasized the need for a durable reporting solution rather than temporary workarounds.