Government Computer News
FBI showcases Trilogy, information sharing
Senior FBI officials today pointed to the recently completed Trilogy network and their progress in creating a data warehouse as the leading projects in their IT overhaul.
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Wilson Lowery, executive assistant director for administration, said the March 28 deployment of the first phase of the Trilogy project at 591 sites included fielding 22,000 workstations, 2,612 switches and routers, 622 Ethernet LANs and 291 servers at FBI locations worldwide.
The Trilogy network relies on a four-tier infrastructure with redundant connections and an asynchronous transfer mode frame relay backbone.
To bolster security in the network, Lowery said, “We can see if anyone in the organization is going into files they are not allowed access to.”
The Trilogy network later this year will host the Virtual Case File system, a browser-based application that will let FBI agents store, inspect and correlate data about criminal cases and national security investigations. The bureau plans to deploy the VCF on Dec. 13.
Bureau officials last year scrapped the technical approach they previously had taken to creating the VCF, which involved building graphical user interfaces on top of the FBI’s existing IBM 3270 mainframe-based, green screen Automated Case File System.
A team of FBI agents reviewed the GUI approach to overhauling the system last spring and concluded that it amounted to “putting lipstick on a pig,” an official said. Last summer, bureau systems specialists responded to FBI director Robert Mueller III’s directive not to automate obsolete business processes by holding meetings with dozens of subject area experts brought in from across the agency to plan a better system.
As a result of that process, they designed VCF to be based on an Oracle 9i database and combine several FBI forms into a unified VCF file.
The VCF will replace not only ACS but also individual databases that agents have built on their own to track cases. “The problem is we haven’t had an IT structure; we have been inefficient in the use of resources,” a senior FBI official said. “The VCF will be a model for the replacement of other stovepipe systems.”
The FBI’s decades-old personnel system is a key candidate for overhaul, Lowery said.
Lowery said he was surprised to learn how backward FBI systems were when he joined the bureau last year. “We were starting much further back than I envisioned.” he said. In many cases, the original documentation for FBI systems is no longer available, so changing them requires reverse engineering.
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