Posted on 08/18/2006 7:13:39 AM PDT by Small-L
It was late 2003, and a contractor, Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), had spent months writing 730,000 lines of computer code for the Virtual Case File (VCF), a networked system for tracking criminal cases that was designed to replace the bureau's antiquated paper files and, finally, shove J. Edgar Hoover's FBI into the 21st century.
he warned FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III that the $170 million system was in serious trouble. A year later, it was dead. The nation's premier law enforcement and counterterrorism agency, burdened with one of the government's most archaic computer systems, would have to start from scratch.
In a 318-page report, completed in January 2005 and obtained by The Post under the Freedom of Information Act, Aerospace said the SAIC software was incomplete, inadequate and so poorly designed that it would be essentially unusable under real-world conditions. Even in rudimentary tests, the system did not comply with basic requirements, the report said. It did not include network-management or archiving systems -- a failing that would put crucial law enforcement and national security data at risk, according to the report.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
From personal experience, that's the SAIC management philosophy--Get a Time and Materials contract, burn through the money as fast as possible, book the profits as early as possible, and worry about delivering a product later--usually with dozens of Engineering Changes to pad to total cost and profit.
Corruption in govt contracting? Whodathunk? (sarc off)
Look on the bright side. Some FBI middlemanager is going to get a nice retirement job.
And people thought that contract corruption is limited to the DOD.
...the SAIC software was incomplete, inadequate and so poorly designed that it would be essentially unusable under real-world conditions.
What the heck are they talking about? It works just fine.
(sheesh, what did they expect for $170 million, Ms. Pac-Man?)
This story took up an entire page and was so disorganized I had to read it twice. Too bad they didn't bother to edit it. Same thing happened to the Border Patrol a decade ago. Why can Visa, Mastercard, ect manage to obtain effective programs for dealing with huge masses of info, but the government can't? Ditto communicating airline passanger lists from abroad before planes take off.
So will SAIC be prohibited from competing for other government contracts.
Sadly, some college students could set up the system using available software. Too many government agencies assume they need new software but don't look at using what is commercially availbe and paying someone to set it up. I bet Oracle or Microsoft could have done the project using an existing product.
;-) One could only wish. The difficulty is that every other Beltway Bandit is just as bad.
ROTFL. SAIC holds more government contracts than anyone else if I'm not mistaken. Plenty of them involve military use. Let's hope they turn out better than this one.
Maybe. There are objected oriented APIs for building database interfaces.
What the government needs to do is develop an extension of one of those API sets for government use. That shouldn't take more than $7-10 million dollars and 10-18 months to develop, and simultaneously develop several government applications, including the FBI application. And any new development after that would cost significantly less, and time to deployment would be minimized.
Open source CMS solutions are great examples of how the modular approach and common, object oriented API can allow the creation of unique websites from a common code base.
From my own experience, it's not just SAIC. This philosophy is rampant in all areas of government contracting.
I did a project for the Navy where the project was managed by a committee that met once a month. None of the people on the committee had any software experience and every time they met they changed the specifications for the project. Every change they made required months of rework and introduced new problems to the software. For example, they asked for a database that would run on Windows 98. We were in the final testing phases when they decided it needed to be compatible with DOS. It started as an MS Access program and they decided it needed to run over the internet.
The initial concept was straight forward and could have been done for a couple of hundred thousand. In the end the project ran over 5 million and was scrapped before it was ever operational.
I'm sure the who thing could have been done with off the shelf software using any number of available data-base programs. The bigger the budget the bigger the boondoggel.
This is what happens when
1) non-tech administrators have to make decisions about tech.
2) mid-level knowledge people have been thinned out in budget reductions or outsourced.
3. See number 1.
Lol, used to work for SAIC myself. It was all about billing.
Its also obvious that the FBI did not look and see what other government/military agencies are using. The FBI is not the only agency that needs to be secure.
I'm sure they are of the mindset that they need a "different" software when one might already be made and just needs to be modified.
But, the GOOD news is that SAIC got $170 million!!
Moral of the story: DON'T buy a cow until you've tested the milk FIRST!!!
Agreed about probable cause.
SAIC, CSC, and a bunch of others do really good work for the Navy, Intel community, and many more technically competent government agencies with a good cadre of technical program managers and a clear idea of what they really want.
DOJ, and certainly the FBI, aren't among those agencies. They have a cop attitude, and if you don't wear a gun, you don't really count.
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