EMBARGOED UNTIL AUGUST 26, 2005 AT 17:00 ET
Newswise — The Virtual Case File (VCF) was supposed to automate the FBI's paper-based work environment, allow agents and intelligence analysts to share vital investigative information, and replace the Bureau's obsolete Automated Case Support system. Instead, the FBI claims that the contractor, Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC), San Diego, delivered 700 000 lines of code so bug-ridden and useless that in April the Bureau had to scrap the $170 million project and write off $105 million worth of code. At the same time, reports from various government oversight agencies and independent observers show that the FBI, lacking technical and project management expertise and knowledge about its own information technology infrastructure, shares the blame for the project's failure.
This past May, a month after it officially ended the VCF project, the FBI announced that it would buy off-the-shelf software to be deployed in phases over the next four years at an undisclosed cost as part of a project dubbed Sentinel. Until those systems are up and running, however, the FBI will rely on essentially the same combination of paper records and antiquated software that the VCF was supposed to replace.
As the FBI prepares to spend hundreds of millions more on software over the next several years, questions persist as to how the VCF went so terribly wrong and whether a debacle of even bigger proportions looms on the horizon. Despite high-profile Congressional hearings, hundreds of pages of reports churned out by oversight bodies, and countless anguished articles in the trade press and mainstream media, the inner workings of the project and the major players have remained largely invisible. Now, as part of a special report on software in the September issue of IEEE Spectrum, detailed interviews with people directly involved in the VCF disaster paint a picture of an enterprise IT project that fell into most basic traps of software development, from poor planning to bad communication.
Lost amid the recriminations was an early warning from one member of the development team that questioned the FBI's technical expertise, SAIC's management practices, and the competence of both organizations. This security expert aired his objections in the fall of 2002, first to his SAIC supervisor and then in a posting to a Web discussion board that appeared just before the two parties agreed on a (deeply flawed) 800-page set of system requirements that doomed the project before a line of code was written. His reward: a visit from two FBI agents concerned that he had disclosed national security secrets on the Internet.
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