FBI and Microsoft Fast Question
April 5, 2010
I read “FBI System Modernization Faulted” and realized that the Information Week write up might be touching upon a portion of the elephant. From my polluted pond in Kentucky, I have no access to juicy details that may be floating around watering holes in downtown DC, but maybe additional information will surface. What I noted in the write up was this interesting passage:
he Department of Justice’s inspector general has expressed new concerns about the progress of the agency’s $451 million-plus case management system, less than two weeks after FBI director Robert Mueller told Congress that the bureau had again suspended work on certain parts of the system’s deployment. “After more than 3 years and $334 million expended on the development and maintenance of Sentinel, the cost to Sentinel is rising, the completion of Sentinel has been delayed, and the FBI does not have a current schedule or cost estimate for completing the project,” the report says.
The search component seems to be chugging along:
Lockheed has begun to move administrative case data from the mainframe to the core Sentinel system itself. This will enable the FBI and Lockheed to deploy enhanced search capabilities based on Microsoft’s FAST enterprise search products. With this — and the migration of further data from ACS to Sentinel over the next phase of the project — will come the ability for users to customize their profiles, enabling them to receive automatic alerts whenever information about certain individuals, topics, and locations gets posted or uploaded to Sentinel.
Now the elected officials are monitoring the information system:
“It’s terribly frustrating that we’re in this position again,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said in a statement last week after learning of the most recent delays. “This is the third go at modernizing the FBI’s computer system and hundreds of millions of dollars have been wasted. I plan to hold the FBI’s feet to the fire until this project is back on track and completed.”
One question, “What happens when the system does not work?” I think this is an unlikely situation but something is causing ace integrator Lockheed and software giant Microsoft to look a bit off center. History has a habit of repeating itself. Describing software is so much easier than getting software to deliver on certain marketing assertions in my experience.
Stephen E Arnold, April 5, 2010
No one paid me to capture these thoughts.
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One Response to “FBI and Microsoft Fast Question”
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It probably speaks more directly to Lockheed’s project management and system integration skills, than MS FAST. After all, the paragraph you quoted indicates that the FAST part is moving forward (though I guess it doesn’t explicitly state that it’s progressing as expected). In the article, the paragraph before mentions the parts that seem to be displaying the most problems:
“In particular, the delay comes down to problems with some electronic forms and associated workflows, an ability to transfer files from ACS to Sentinel, and a help tool, the report says.”
I could some MS products being involved in those capabilities, but I don’t see FAST ESP being specifically involved in them. Well, if the SBC (or FAST Home) is part of an associated workflow, that ‘might’ be a touchpoint between the problems mentioned and FAST. But the other problem areas seem to be specific to coded solutions that would exist outside of the FAST ESP product space.