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GCN Home > 06/27/07 web stories

FBI rolls out Sentinel’s first phase

CIO cites schedule, cost, function wins

By Wilson P. Dizard III

The FBI appeared to leave its checkered information technology management past behind as it fielded the first phase of the Sentinel investigative case management system. The system allows FBI special agents, supervisors and executives to process evidence and other information as well as schedule and monitor work flow, using secure information sharing technology, the bureau said.

About 30,000 FBI users now access Sentinel as they begin a typical work day, chief information officer Zal Azmi said in a phone interview.

Azmi noted that bureau officials were pleased with the investigative case management system’s operational features. The first phase of the project cost the FBI about $59 million, which roughly approximated its cost target, he added. And the vendor team led by Lockheed Martin met the bureau’s expectations for the scheduled completion of the first phase of the Sentinel contract, bringing to a close an award the FBI issued in March 2006.

The bureau awarded the first phase of Sentinel as a contract that would be severable from subsequent phases, so the agency would not be effectively bound to its initially chosen vendor team, Azmi said.

The bureau’s cautious approach to the Sentinel contract award, which was preceded by months of planning and business process re-engineering, reflected in part the FBI’s headline-grabbing multimillion-dollar debacle with the system’s predecessor, Virtual Case File, which forced the bureau to abandon work for which it had paid about $109 million. The FBI unveiled the Sentinel rollout on June 19.

Sentinel is built around a core of commercial applications that include “mainly IBM products, such as IBM Websphere, the Tivoli security manager [and an Oracle database management system],” Azmi said. Sentinel runs on Sun Solaris and Microsoft Windows platforms, he added.

“Lockheed, IBM and Accenture are still our team [for integrating the commercial apps],” Azmi said in the interview, suggesting that the Lockheed-led team would move ahead with additional Sentinel work.

Bureau IT officials gave the system a shakedown cruise with the day-to-day work in the Richmond, Va., Baltimore and Washington field offices as well as the headquarters Cyber Crime division before furnishing the system to other FBI users.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Data Management, Homeland Security, Workflow / Collaboration



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