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FBI Conducts Feasibility Study on Project Sentinel
leave-no-trace writes "CNN reports that "FBI officials hope to award a contract by the year's end for a complex new software program (dubbed Sentinel) to replace a failed project that was canceled this year at a cost of more than $100 million to taxpayers." The system is supposed to include search capabilities, protocols for processing and handling FBI reports, security issues and a new system for records management. FBI Director Robert Mueller told lawmakers he is unable yet to place a price tag on the Sentinel project."
I know that many who have not worked either for or around the US government before are shocked at how money is spent (squandered) on projects that never finish or are dead the day they are deployed.
The US Department of Energy spent approximately $250 million on a project to convert low-level radioactive waste into a concrete slurry that would be poured into a vault for disposal. They began construction on the vaults and had the grout plant ready to begin operation. Unfortunately, they didn't get approval of from the State of Washington before they began construction. At the point where full-scale testing was to begin, the State rejected their application to operate. Seems they were working a dual track: design and construction while simultaneously working on permit approval.
They gambled and lost. $250M dropped in a hole and it never hit bottom. The money that was spent on the FBIs last system will suffer a similar fate.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Seriously:
No one else has a hope of pulling an information indexing and retrieval project of this scale off, and they excel at exactly this kind of thing.
Plus, there's that "First, do no evil...." motto.
--Red
a $100 million software project breaks down to:
~ 1.6 million well paid programmer hours
or a roughly 50 strong team of (well paid) programmers and experts working for nearly 15 years without taking holidays or weekends off. If you want you can cut that down to 8 years and you've still got about $50M to play with for your servers and networking.
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Part of the problem has to do with their insane restrictions on how money can be spent. They will pay $X/hr for an engineer and no higher. They will pay 8% administrative overhead and no higher. You can't put brilliant (but expensive) people on the project because the cost structure isn't set up to reward that. Instead, you are almost forced to hire hundreds of warm bodies to bring that 8% up to something reasonable.
I think successful projects get done in spite of the government, and they are usually done by one person or a small team of people. I know. I single-handedly developed a database integration projection for a government agency back in the mid 1980's that is still in use today. I doubt if a team could have done it. It was me working 18 hour days and weekends that did it. And I did it in spite of some lazy bastard government types who stood in my way.
-- SKYKING, SKYKING, DO NOT ANSWER.
I get mad as much as the next guy at government wasting my tax money, however, I do not believe that it is a specifically governmental characteristic.
Most companies, seem to have the same problems (project Monterey anyone?). The main difference, is that we (rightly) feel that government's money is our money, so it affects us more. On top of that, because it's our money media are much more likely to report those failures, particularly since governments are obligated to disclose such information. Secret projects in some company's lab are very likely to remain secret.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
Why? Simply put. In the government it is impossible to get a spec. You spend months in negotiation trying to nail down something. Once you do and you write up the spec. There is always that funky little clause which allows for "changes unforseen do to the needs of the governement." It's worse than having heart lung machines designed by marketing.
At the end of stage one a contract is signed. Ok folks time to start.... nope.... not yet. Depending on how the money was allocated they may or may not have to get outside approval. This could be the dept's accounting section, the GAO, or Congress. God in heaven help you if congress gets wind of it. Every Senator and Congressman along with 50K pedantic purveyors of polluted pullet piss (aka lobyists) will be on it like white on rice instantly. Each determined to get a piece of the pie for their district. (We don't need air horns for errors a simple PC speaker and beep will do just fine.... Oh I see Congressman Pantywhistle's district makes air horns, and he's head of the appropriations commitee.) Now the problem is that all of this doesn't get done until 1 week before budgetting tightens up tighter than a bullfrogs butt. You as the contractor have to finish out the new specs and get them to the proper authorities. (What do you mean Mr Toefinger is on vacation! He has to sign the paper work.... Fine can we fedHex it to him in Aruba?) He in turn will get the address wrong on the pre-addressed return envelope and in the end you will wind up getting your paperwork in to budgetting at 3:59 on the last day (one hour before closing)
Will Sentinel fail, yes but it will faill less than it's predicessor, leaving someone to say.....
It would have worked if we'd only had a couple of hundred million more.
(and over in the corner will be a lone secretary, notebook and PDA in hand, who will have created with a spreadsheet and and addressbook a better replacement for sentinal than sentinal itself.)
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
Let's take a look at the list of bright ideas for names:
Now, let's take a look at what the people doing this could learn from:
There are things that it's okay to attach scary appellations to. Fighter jets -- Fighting Falcon, Tigershark, Hornet, Cobra, Phantom, Demon, Banshee, Fury. Those are supposed to be scary, because it gives people a sense of vicarious power and excitement. Naming domestic monitoring and law enforcement systems (and that is, with the addition of counterintelligence, the job of the FBI) anything scary-sounding is a very bad idea.
While the United States doesn't usually do this, here are some other points:
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Heck, just type in "DMV software debacle" in google, that comes up with an Amazon.com book on the subject as the numeber one hit. Try just "software debacle" for even more instances.
The choice between Conspiracy or Incompetence comes up all too often. While Conspiracy is more interesting, the sad truth is that something much less is usually involved.
In any event, the money doesn't dissappear. It ends up in the economy somewhere, and was probably better spent on a failed high-tech program than it would have been in an outright give-away (like unemployment benefits for those same programmers).
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.