What was this supposed to fix?

This is the part that helped me understand this: "It was kind of like a miracle drug," [Ruth Samuelson] said. "It's going to do all this stuff and I just didn't think it was possible."

It appears to me, just reading this account, that there wasn't a clearly articulated problem. Perhaps the reporter is only summarizing, but the quote "The state and county had long wanted to make a largely paper-driven court system more efficient and speed up arrest processing, among other things" says a lot: "more efficient" is wishful thinking.

I wonder how this would have played out if the criminal justice folks had a list of specific problems they needed solved?

For example (again, hypothesizing here), "County employees continued to test more than 30 versions of the system in 2005, and documented problem after problem." Did they have concrete problems they were trying to solve? Were they applying new technology to older procedures?

My experience is that when you have a specific problem, the "solved" and "not solved" issues are a little easier to lift up. Documenting "problem after problem" sure sounds like the users were exploring the software, rather than applying the software.