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GCN Home > 03/07/05 issue

Cold case

By Wilson P Dizard III, GCN Staff

With its Virtual Case File possibly DOA, the FBI must figure out how to modernize case management without repeating its earlier mistakes

The collapse of the FBI’s Virtual Case File project leaves the bureau facing complex choices about how to modernize case management for its workers and how to quell skeptics who question whether the bureau can avoid making the same management missteps.

Over the last five years, the FBI appears to have wasted $104 million on a system that it may never use—a loss that FBI director Robert S. Mueller III acquiesced to last month during a grilling on Capitol Hill.

The botched project has provoked lawmakers to question whether poor IT management is a problem stretching beyond the Hoover building.

“This could be a systemic issue across agencies,” Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) said.

It was at a hearing of Gregg’s Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, State and the Judiciary that Mueller and others testified about how the VCF project careened off course [www.gcn.com, Quickfind 380].

“Maybe we should have an independent executive team with expertise [to oversee systems projects] that is consistent and technologically current,” Gregg suggested, saying he intended to broach the idea with his fellow lawmakers.

The cause for the VCF project’s failure, as determined by the Justice Department inspector general and independent auditors: inadequate project oversight, poor investment planning and scope creep.

Endless changes made by the FBI, however, are what ultimately hamstrung the program. The project’s contractor, Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego, documented the requirements requests from the bureau. In one 18-month period, the FBI requested 399 requirement changes.

Plus, there has been continuous turnover in senior IT management during the course of the project. There have been five CIOs since the FBI began work on VCF.

So what are the bureau’s options?

More news on related topics: Acquisition / Contracts, Enterprise Architecture, Knowledge Management, Outsourcing, IT Management



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