Okay, things went much better yesterday than the days before. But before I proceed I want to emphasize that these are my personal opinions and do not reflect those of my employer. Further, I have not yet received any formal training in the system nor seen the system as a whole. And finally, I do not wish to cast dispersion on anyone connected with this project, whether within the Judiciary or the vendor chosen to create the system. Everyone involved seems to be committed to doing as good a job as possible and the vendor appears to have qualified people here to lead the project.
With that said, the system worked and I got to see how things are configured. I will try to use an analogy to describe what the system does (fully acknowledging again that I've seen just one very small part of it).
At the level of use I saw yesterday, the system is similar to a content management system like MovableType. By that I mean you take something like HTML and then add your own tags that work only with your system. In this case, you use WordPerfect or Word as your form editor to create the look and feel of the form. You then insert their (a company called ACS) tag variables where ever you want information from the central database to be displayed. You then publish the form by doing a merge that populates the form with the data drawn from the Oracle database.
There are something like 400 predefined variables. These variables come with the system and are the same whether you using it here or anywhere else the vendor has sold their software. It is possible to custom design variables but, of course, you are on you own when it comes to supporting any changes you've made (which sounds fair to me).
In order to save money, the Judiciary is trying, to the extent possible, to keep customization of the base software to a minimum. As fellow Daynoter Sjon Svenson correctly states in his email below, one of the major reasons for the failure of large projects like this (centralized or not) is feature creep. That is, the scope of work, as originally designed, changes so much, as new features are added or existing features are substantially modified, that the project collapses in confusion, cost over runs, and cross charges of featherbedding or incompetence.
In my opinion, to the extent that the Judiciary and the vendor can avoid this is the extent to which this multi-million dollar multi-year project will succeed.
