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Frankly Speaking: FBI 2.0

20.03.2006
Think US$500 million is a lot of money? That's how much the FBI may end up spending over the next six years on its new case management system, dubbed Sentinel. Maybe you remember Sentinel's predecessor, Virtual Case File. The VCF project lasted four years and cost a mere $170 million. Of course, VCF was such a mess that when the project was killed one year ago this month, it was completely useless. Four years and $170 million later, the FBI had nothing to show for it. Now that's an expensive project.

Can the FBI do any better today with $500 million? Maybe.

The difference won't be the money. Three times the money, spent the same way, would just produce a hole three times as deep.

The difference will come in how the FBI uses that money. And right now, the bureau is acting as if every nickel counts.

For example, instead of building a bright, shiny, all-new vehicle like it did with VCF, the FBI is going the used-car route for Sentinel. It's using the enterprise IT architecture it salvaged from the wreck of VCF. It's borrowing an experienced IT project manager from the CIA and an acquisition contract from the National Institutes of Health. And it has squeezed $97 million out of divisional budgets for the first of the project's four phases.

That's another difference with Sentinel: It has four clearly defined, overlapping phases, each with deliverables. VCF didn't have that. Its developers kept plowing ahead as technology changed and requirements shifted because of 9/11. After four years, VCF delivered nothing useful.