FBI moves ahead with successor to ill-fated IT upgrade

11.08.2005
Von Todd R.

Five months after scrapping a failed, long-awaited replacement for its case-file management system, the FBI this week began soliciting bids for a new system that it hopes will finally deliver on past promises.

In an announcement Monday, the agency said it began sending bid requests to more than 40 vendors for its next-generation electronic information management system, called Sentinel.

The proposed system would consolidate and replace the FBI"s legacy case management capabilities with an integrated, paperless file management and workflow system that the agency will use to improve and modernize its crime- and terrorism-fighting efforts, according to the bureau.

"Sentinel will further enable the FBI to achieve its mission priorities by enhancing information access and promoting information sharing with law enforcement and intelligence community members, to include the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security," the FBI said in a statement. "The program will incrementally deliver capabilities to FBI users over the life of the project."

An FBI spokesman couldn"t immediately be reached for comment this morning.

The price tag for the new project hasn"t been disclosed.

The move to seek bids begins just five months after the FBI scrapped a previous project, the US$170 million Virtual Case File (VCF) system, which failed to meet expectations after four years of work (see "It"s official: FBI scraps $170M Virtual Case File project"). That project, which began in June 2001, was supposed to help agents investigate terrorism, but it was delayed and never lived up to those expectations.

The prime vendor for the VCF project, San Diego-based Science Applications International Corp., delivered the VCF to the agency in December 2004. About $104 million of the $170 million budgeted for it had already been spent on the project at the time of its cancellation.

The new Sentinel system is slated to be delivered in four phases to try and avoid some of the problems that arose with the all-at-once deployment of the VCF system, according to the agency. The bids are expected to be submitted to the FBI for evaluation this fall, with a contract awarded by the end of the year.

In June, the FBI announced that it would move forward with the Sentinel project after hundreds of problems were found with VCF (see "FBI CIO: Case management efforts moving forward"). The canceled project was supposed to allow FBI employees to more quickly share data about cases in progress, including terrorism investigations, and to help FBI agents around the country search documents and connect leads coming from diverse sources.

Sentinel will include automated workflow functions, document-search capabilities, case management and other tools. It also will allow the FBI to distribute the unclassified portions of otherwise classified documents to other law enforcement agencies.