The Judiciary is moving, at last, to correct expensive missteps by giving notice that it will cancel a software contract unless its reported shortcomings are corrected within about a month.

At the risk of Monday-morning quarterbacking, it would have been far better to have anticipated potential problems before signing a contract with ACS Government Systems.

Doing so would have averted the legal wrangling that's only just beginning here. Three years after their contract was inked, ACS and the city and county governments in Nashville are still embroiled in a lawsuit over whether ACS breached a contract for software to manage the traffic violations process in Tennessee.

So the costs to taxpayers are sure to go far beyond the original $5.2 million invested in the Hawai'i courts computerization project known as Judiciary Information Management System, and the additional $1.1 million in change-order expenses.

A spokesman for the Dallas-based company maintained that ACS still wants to work with the state to develop a system to meet the Judiciary's changing needs.

Whether or not that can be accomplished, the relationship with the vendor has been severely damaged, and that's never a good thing.

To some extent, the Judiciary already has learned a valuable lesson, too late to avert this fiasco but something other government agencies should note.

One of the agency's handicaps in this situation was not having a systems expert on staff to understand in detail what tasks a computer network would have to achieve to function well.

It's a shortcoming that the Judiciary since has fixed by hiring in-house project management staff. These are the people best able to create the specifications for any future replacement system.

The other failing was to let the problem fester without taking action for so long. There is an inertia that sets in with large bureaucracies — nobody wants to restart the entire process from scratch — but public agencies simply must act more swiftly, to avoid wasting taxpayer funds without resolution.

The Judiciary hopes to use other software solutions so that its efficiency improvements won't stall for too long, but this quagmire certainly hasn't helped in that mission.

What would be even worse is if other government agencies looking to upgrade computer networks don't learn from these mistakes.