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The FBI Software Upgrade That Wasn't
Davemania writes "Washington Post reports that the FBI's attempt to modernize their department has once again failed. The 170 million dollar Virtual case File system, the agency's second attempt to go paperless is reported to be useless. The finger seems to be pointing at the FBI leadership, greedy contractors and bad software management." From the article: "It appeared to work beautifully. Until Azmi, now the FBI's technology chief, asked about the error rate. Software problem reports, or SPRs, numbered in the hundreds, Azmi recalled in an interview. The problems were multiplying as engineers continued to run tests. Scores of basic functions had yet to be analyzed. 'A month before delivery, you don't have SPRs,' Azmi said. 'You're making things pretty. . . . You're changing colors.'"
I love helping you /.ers out. Instead of spending painstaking hours clicking thru multiple page news stories, I sit here and quickly provide you with printer friendly links
If the anybody can screw up a big project like that it is the government. If it was 170 million of somebody's own money I think that it would have been done a lot better but since it is only the taxpayers money they seem to really mess things up. Perhaps this is one of the many reason we should limit the federal govt to their proper role as given in the Constitution.
The reason seems quite obvious to me: a shortage of programmers who can get the job done right.
Personally, I'd prefer the FBI not go paperless. Because (a) paper trails are nice in investigations and such (y'know, when the FBI finally goes up against the Supreme Court) and (b) stuff that doesn't have a hardcopy tends to get lost more often than physical objects...especially embarassing things...especially by government agencies.
Yes. I'm slightly paranoid.
Anyone else think the comments just weren't rendering right before they turned off ABP and saw ads?
it remained riddled with shortcomings:
Agents would not be able to take copies of their cases into the field for reference.
The program lacked common features, such as bookmarking or histories, that would help agents navigate through millions of files.
The system could not properly sort data.
Most important, the FBI planned to launch the new software all at once, with minimal testing beforehand. Doing so, the NRC team concluded, could cause "mission-disruptive failures" if the software did not work, because the FBI had no backup plan.
Sounds like they had CS101 students writing this. No bookmarking or history? No sorting? Sad.
'A month before delivery, you don't have SPRs,' Azmi said. 'You're making things pretty. . . . You're changing colors.'
Can I get the icon in 'cornflower blue'?
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
And that is how you get rich doing work for the government. The government agency comes up with a half-assed plan, you put in a low bid, they accept and start handing you checks, and you make things look pretty, all the while hiding the flaws. In then end, you've become rich, the goverment runs a deficit, and the American taxpayer foots the bill.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Wouldn't it make sense to go for a more basic application as a first run, to at least provide a unified collaborative work environment, and use the working experience therein to define a more strategic, long term technology plan for the FBI? As I understand it, today's world involves many separate stores of information, electronic and not. Simply bringing those together in the crudest of fashions could provide significant gains in a relatively short time frame.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
As someone that had to deal with specalized vertical market software.......
I say DUH!
ALL vertical market software sucks big time. Hell I helped a client yesterday that has a bunch of salons with installing a new PC (we do automation but help the big clients on the side) and their scheduling software is a giant piece of crap they pay $1000.00 per station for. At the dentist I always am amazed they fight witht he hideous crap for software they have.
FBI software? it has to be a giant pile of fecies... just because that is how this type of software is.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
'A month before delivery,' Professor Knuth said looking up through his spectacles 'you can start implementing it if your correctness proofs are complete.'"
Ha! Welcome to the real world, guys.
That it's not just the British government that can't manage an IT project to save its life.
"I'll just file this case in my Virtual Filing Cabinet"
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
Call me crazy, but it sounds like the FBI didn't know what it wanted and SAIC was too scared and proud to play contractor hardball with its client to get the job done. The FBI is legendary for its fractured leadership, fiefdoms (makes most agencies look like a single organism it's so bad) and crap like that.
What do you expect? They don't have time or resources for testing because all the agents are too busy listening in on my calls to my grandmother.
Are you...Are you some kind of genius?
No, ma'am, I'm just a regular Slashdot reader.
They should have just started by picking a decent directory structure for the documents and then hooking up a decent search engine like the Google Appliance. Then the users could simply use web browsers instead of a weak, buggy, and expensive custom application.
Non CS people who commission custom software development often have no clue how expensive their ego driven non-standard features can be.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
you've been beaten out by another karma whore
It's called WOM, or Write-Only Memory system. This system has near-infinite storage capacity, and can be implemented across the entire enterprise.
Document retrival in the WOM? Not a problem! Just create imaginary documents! Isin't that the way it's done, anyway?
Oh, and if you need a record expunged, not a problem! In fact, it requires almost no effort at all!
Write-Only Memory Virtual Filing System. It was good enough for Nasa, it ought to be good enough for the FBI.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
awwww.... you need a hug!
Do you feel safer while we're more in debt, to China, than anyone was ever in debt before to anyone, while spending a third of a $TRILLION in Iraq, $BILLIONS on fake FBI upgrades that do nothing but enrich scam contractors, and the richest among us demand more tax breaks, like "estate tax" breaks after they're dead?
WHERE'S OSAMA?
--
make install -not war
"You're making things pretty. . . . You're changing colors."
That's the FBI policy: they're part of Homeland Security, so their job is mainly to tells what color today is. Otherwise terrorists might have trouble knowing which days we're not checking everyone or paying closest attention.
--
make install -not war
...This turned into the typical "Boil the Ocean" project. Features kept being added and scope increased until there was no way it could be successful in a finite time/schedule.
Wow... I have never, ever seen a software product that wasn't working on QA bug reports right up to the minute the gold disc is burned. And afterwards, of course, working on all the pre-release bugs that had been classified as 'known issues'.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Ever the pecimist, I think it's probably just a cover-up, make a big PR thing about how it failed, and then let it run in the background.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Spit.
The trouble with project managers (and security people) is that they have a checklist mentality.
PM: Have you done this as yet.
You: No, there is no need for it
PM: But I need to get it checked off on my plan
You: It shouldn't be on the plan in the first place
PM: But it is on the plan, so I need to get it checked off. When are you going to do it.
And so on.
IBM Content Manager!
I just started a new job where they use this. It's pretty cool. Got APIs and all that. Kinda big and expensive tho.
Rereading the summary, the submitter has it wrong - "FBI's attempt to modernize their department has once again failed" implies that Sentinel has failed - which is definitely not the content of the article. Even the snippet quoted is about VCF having problems, not Sentinel.
That's it. I've had it.
I've spent too many years working my rear off.
It's time to start bidding on government programming contracts.
Imagine, being paid loads of money and not having to produce anything functional, with the worst repercussion being having to change your company name before bidding on a new contract.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Geez
Not to speak ill of anyone but that's a lot of money to produce a big pile of shit. Now I would be willing to cut them some slack EXCEPT it's not the first time they have done this. Simultaneously with the FBI system, SAIC was working on a case management project for another intelligence agency, burned through millions of dollars and produced basically a bunch of screen shots and proof that they didn't understand what this agency wanted. Like the FBI this agency farmed the project out to a different company (a smaller company that I used to work for) and we managed to do in one year what SAIC failed to do in 2 years because we weren't focused on milking the government cash cow we were focused on coding a product that WORKED and MET THE BUSINESS NEEDS of the client. It's not rocket science.
I heard a story a while back about a three-letter government agency who wanted a new air conditioning system put in. So the company doing it said, ok, I'll need to know how many people will be working in the building on average, etc., etc., and they were told that that's all classified, so they were forced to make a guess. Later, when the system didn't work so well, the same agency wanted to sue them, but it didn't get anywhere, due to the lack of fundamental information provided which was required for the optimal operation of the system in the first place. Typical.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I hate the lowest bidder system. It seems like the root of all screwups in the government. It's not as black and white as you are competeing for model number 00120 of product X. All but the simplest of cases shouldn't have to go through the whole lowest bidder system. Quality is extremely important and low bids don't take that into account. This story didn't really mention whether this was a low bid deal or not, keep in mind.
Look at pretty much any government building that was built on the lowest bidder system. I can pretty much guarantee it has mold or leaking issues.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
It would be nice if, sometimes, large organizations realized that applying computers to solving the problems of a paper trail is going to cause many many problems before any benefits are seen. In working with my university, I've seen time and again the tendency of higher-ups to see computers as a panacea to any/all problems an office might confront in keeping records on things.
For example, our housing lottery system was, until this past year, an in-person process where people were assigned times, showed up, claimed rooms, and was a fair system that worked. Then, the university got all fancy pants and replaced that lottery with this unbelievably crappy system called Residential Management System. To use: kill ad blocker, only use it in IE for Windows, ensure javascript settings are correct, and then wait until the clock allows you into the online lottery system. Attempt to use a non-intuitive UI that is completely new because you couldn't look at it before while time ticks away and other people claim the rooms you wanted. Even though I got the room I wanted, the experience was horrifyingly bad.
For these large organizations, I think less can be more. Keep your paper trail, but create a highly efficient system for digitizing documents. That way, you start to have some advantages of computers (search, organization, cross-referencing) without the liability of a completely paperless system. From here, you can slowly make a transition from leaning on paper to leaning on machines. But that would be the sane way of doing things, and we're talking about a governement organization here.
What the FBI needs is a small team of a couple smart guys who understand enough technology to know what is and isn't algorithmically or logically impossible, and understand how to deal with the human elements of project management from their end. Basically a real CTO and a couple good project managers and architect level technologists. If these people work with the contractors to gather requirements, build early prototypes to evaluate functionality before investing hundreds of millions in a fully functional system, and bring on board domain experts for specific areas like security, redundancy, backup systems, etc., then they should be fine. The fact that they seem not to have such a team and instead choose to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at contractors is just a disgusting waste of taxpayer dollars.
You won't understand this until you've worked as a government contractor. When you are a contractor, the government employees are god (or at least that's what they think). In 90% of the projects that I have worked on for the government, it's the government employees who cause most of the problems. You are not given the authority to tell them "NO", and you must live with their idiotic decisions, even when you know that it will just cause more problems.
The new project is even worse than the old. No software, with the possible exception of truly safety-critical stuff like missle-control or nuclear power plants, needs to cost $425 million and take four years. You could have a custom OS written in pure assembly for a quarter of that!
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
What TFA describes is the current state of general software development for hire, which has changed very little in the 18 years I have been programming.
It doesn't matter how well planned the project is, or how well educated the customer is, or the proper allocation of project champions on the client side, we all end up getting hit with b.s. look-and-feel complaints that end up taking higher priority than fixing bugs.
If you give the client the option between tweaking a template to a report, and tweaking the queries that feed the damn report so it runs 10% faster, the client will ask you to first make it pretty, then worry about the queries. If you dare ask them why, they will give you a b.s. explanation that it is all about perception. That the pretty page looks more "professional" and it looks like more work and care was put into it.
A word of warning to those of you that are new to for-profit programming: whenever somebody uses the "it looks more professional" gambit, it usually means he has no excuse and is hoping you will drop it. He asked you to do it simply to please himself. HE wants the damn color of the page changed, or that heading two pixels taller, etc.
Every couple of years we get hit with new programming methodology fads, but those don't help us with dealing with difficult customers. When you are pulling millions every year from the same two or three government contracts, the last thing your project manager wants is to piss off any of the primaries for the contracts. Extreme programming won't suddenly make your client listen to you.
Why the hell do you think that programmers are so rabidly enthusiastic about working for free for a specific open source project? These same programmers will drag their feet and hate life in general when working at their salaried jobs. At the free project a hell of a lot of the people involved in running the project will actually have a clue, while at the projects at the salaried job the norm is a lot of the people in charge won't have a clue.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
I am surprised that they do not take a lesion from the DOT departments. Put in clauses in the contract giving them penalties if the project fails or is late, and rewards if it is early and does more then originally planned. Remember the highway bridge in LA that was finished something like a year ahead of schedule? The contractor was rewarded with a few million because of that. (I'm going by memory, so I might be off a bit...)
I thought this type of thing was now standard in any software / hardware implementation, be it within a business or government agency.
I'm an editor at IEEE Spectrum. Spectrum laid out out this story in September '05. (I submitted a link to Slashdot at the time, but the editors in their Infinite Wisdom rejected it). Despite our story being prominently featured in google, wikipedia, winning awards, etc, and using similar sources, and so on, the Washington Post didn't acknowledge any of Spectrum's reporting, which has prompted Spectrum's Editor-in-Chief to complain to the Washington's Post's Ombusdman thusly:
Dear Ms. Howell,
We were startled to see that the article "The FBI Upgrade that Wasn't" by
Eggen and Witte in today's Washington Post is taken directly from an article
we did in September 2005 called "Who Killed the Virtual Case File," by Harry
Goldstein (http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/sep05/1455). His article has won 5
major magazine awards. Neither Harry or Spectrum gets credit or attribution
in the Washington Post piece.
Your writers reinterviewed all our sources, including Matthew Patton, whose
only press interview until your story today was in the Spectrum article.
They filed the same FOIA, etc.
Is this plagiarism? Not exactly. Is it shoddy, lazy journalism? You bet.
Sincerely yours,
Susan Hassler
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
How interesting, that a contractor for whom "incompleteness, lack of follow-through, failure to optimize and missing documentation" is business as usual, should be able to gain ANY public-funds contracts REGARDLESS of the "national security" impact. Based on this assessment of SAIC's work for the FBI and characterization of their general lack of competence, it would seem that any dealing with SAIC by a public body should be scrutinized for appropraitions misuse at the very least.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
On another note, does anyone else find it infuriating that SAIC intentionally refused to alert FBI to the project's going awry? I mean, we're not just talking about stealing taxpayer dollars, we're talking about a system that could save lives.
(%i1) factor(777353);
(%o1) 777353
They need to bring in the team developing DukeNukem:Forever.
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
Another failed outsourcing project..
Seriously, I have no idea all of their needs requirements, but it seems like a big one is cross-connecting one set of data with another. The intricate connections of intelligence data probably defies anyones ability to design a system that could capture it all. But, a Wiki, which automatically creates links can do it for you, on the fly. So, create some Wiki templates for information about people, cases, incidents, whatever, and create Wiki links on the keywords when you fill out the templates (names, dates, code names, case numbers, and so on) and let the Wiki link everything together for you.
With a lot of data already entered, in no time you'll be typing in a routine report and find out that the name you just typed already has a Wiki page, and lo and behold! some agent in Nebraska is looking for that exact person for a child abduction. Case closed. All praise the Wiki.
Maybe, just maybe, the FBI needs to hire a software development manager - and 20-30 software developers and testers. Maybe this whole government contract thing just doesn't work any more.
Look at huge projects like the Big Dig, and this FBI software upgrade. Outside companies collect the cash and hand over a botched project.
I'll bet that if these developers and PMs worked for the government on this project and risked losing their jobs, this project would have turned out differently.
-ted
Is it just me or does $232.87 PER LINE of code sound a bit expensive for development costs?
Step 1: Set up a legitimate contracting buisness.
Microsoft Office would've never taken hold...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
From the original post: the FBI's attempt to modernize their department has once again failed
Failed once again? The article (you have to read the whole thing) says it's on track.
The article is 90% about the Virtual Case File system ("built" by SAIC) and it's eventual demise in early 2005, almost 2 years ago. At the end, they discuss the FBI's replacement for VCF, saying:
"Last year, FBI officials announced a replacement for VCF, named Sentinel, that is projected to cost $425 million and will not be fully operational until 2009. A temporary overlay version of the software, however, is planned for launch next year. The project's main contractor, Lockheed Martin Corp., will be paid $305 million and will be required to meet benchmarks as the project proceeds. FBI officials say Sentinel has survived three review sessions and is on budget and on schedule."
Aside from making too much sense for a government project, your plan has a political disadvantage.
Be it a politician showing off for his constituency, or an employee trying to gain power in an organization, small, incremental steps like the ones you describe are too "subtle."
Hell, in the private sector I've been accused of "lacking vision" for proposing incremental changes similar to the ones you describe.
Pointy Haired Bosses want to show off MASIVE strides that they can claim credit for, not smaller projects. It doesn't matter how much progress is actually made. All that matters is how much impact it LOOKS like you're having.
You're thinking like a tech trying to actually resolve the problem. In order to understand how this colossal mess came to be, you have to look at if from the viewpoint of a political battle. It's not about fixing the problems, but LOOKING like you're fixing them.
Imagine for a moment you've been placed in charge of a road system that's in terrible disrepair. A major highway elevated cuts through the center of town and it's falling to pieces. The roads are a warren of side streets and even the locals get lost often due to the poor signage.
Do you:
A: Begin a far reaching plan to revitalize the road system though effective, thorough and competent maintenance, repaving roads and replacing small, hard to read road signs with larger, more visible markers, thus making it easier to navigate the city
B: Begin a misguided plan to move the aging elevated highway underground, requiring you to tunnel through landfill and under rivers, in an area with a subway system that's as random and disordered as the roads above.
If you're a tech, you choose Option A. If you're a politician, you choose Option B, because it provides a LOT of photo opportunities whenever some new segment of the new tunnel system opens. It also provides lots of publicity due to all the "advanced technology" and "top level engineering" needed to pull it off.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
We've learned this over and over again at my company. The likelihood of scrapping the whole thing because you've got nothing is logarithmic to the cost. That is, the more the costs go up, the more likely you scrap the whole thing.
The project has to be bitten in chunks. Lay out the functionality, and then start implementing it one small piece at a time, integrating as you go along. The Big Bang approach is always doomed to failure, or explosive costs, especially when you get to the reality that to deploy you need to shut down the business for two weeks to manage the data conversion. Lot's of small $1 million projects are more likely to succeed and be at budget then one big $20 million project.
This isn't news. It's the whole momentum behind a lot of modern development techniques such as Agile, or architectural such as SOA.
There's also a corrolary that any project involving a big consulting company like EDS, CSC, Anderson(or whatever the hell their name isnow), etc. is more than likely going to cost double what it should.
She solved that problem years ago.
Wouldn't it be in their interests to contract the development out to Google to develop for them? Would Google even do that? After all they are *the* information company and have a knack for keeping the UI simple and extremely usable.
Or...
Do something like the DARPA challenge, have a bunch of colleges compete to provide a usable VCF system in exchange for some grants.
One of the keys to project management is to have an understanding of the project itself. Another key is buy-in from the project sponsor. And the prime key is planning. I cannot emphasize enough how important the planning process is.
When we moved our office we planned ad nauseum but because of that planning had contingencies in place so our operations didn't suffer. The move went off without a major hitch. We also have a fairly good I.T. project management system in place that we use.
Because failure to understand the issues and failing to plan for contingencies doom pretty much all government projects.
Personally, I can't wait to see some of the code of this undoubtedly awesome enterprise-level code show up on the daily wtf. This should be good for a few laughs (then at least my taxes can give me some entertainment value).
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat? -C. Palahniuk
for budgeting something top secret. C.G.B. Spender was unavailable for comment.
wiki.fbi.gov
If the specifications for the system were imprecise or constantly changing (as often happens), that would limit the ability of ANY software developer to create a stable functional system on time and within budget.
I'm not going to criticise the folks who were trying to implement the system until I know a lot more about the actual conditions in which they were trying to work...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
A month before delivery, you don't have SPRs,' Azmi said Hahahahaha... Oh man, that's hilarious. You're lucky if you manage to get rid of them all BY the delivery date... But to say that with a month to go, you are just at the "changing colours" stage? That's awesome.
" 'A month before delivery, you don't have SPRs,' Azmi said. 'You're making things pretty. . . . You're changing colors.'"
I don't know what software shop he worked in, but I've never seen a time when there weren't numerous SPRs. SPRs aren't necessarily a bad thing - they show that you know where the problems are. If all you're doing is changing colors, you're wasting the customer's money. Get out there and find problems to write SPRs on. Any software of nontrivial size is going to have bugs.
DISCLAIMER: This post was not checked for speling and grammar- if you complain- you're a whiner
When I look at huge bureaucratic SNAFUs like this, I can't help but think that an OSS project would have stepped up and filled the hole. Heck, it isn't like there aren't plenty of OSS hackers out there who wouldn't love to contribute to a project that might foil the next terror plot. Why not document the existing infrastructure and put together a software requirements document and let the OSS community go to town creating a FREE software solution? I know that there are some of you out there that wouldn't want the the "man" to use OSS software to track down your pr0n or help build a case against you for all the illegal BitTorrent downloads you have, but, I think most of the OSS community would love a stab at it... sign me up for the web-based UI development! Heck, I'd volunteer my time to help do a business requirements study with field agents... as long as it is the X-files group ;)
Just my $0.02
"Perhaps most amazingly, votaries of 'diversity' insist on absolute conformity." -- Tony Snow
The should hold a DARPA Grand Challenge style contest for the design. The top ten designs get $1,000,000 each and a year to deliver a working prototype. The winner gets a $50,000,000 contract to finish and deliver.
Cost is less than half of what they spent on the VCF system ($10 Mil for the contest + $50 Mil for the winner + $10 Mil for adminitration), and delivers in 3 years (6 months for the contest, 3 month review, 1 year for prototypes + 3 month review, and 1 year to deliver).
All reviews should be open, and for good measure discovery of a major flaw or bugs is worth $1000.
The Istari are not permitted to design or create systems directly. That would involve a direct confrontation of skill against skill, and that is forbidden. Instead, they can only provide limited assistance to those who are trying to write their own systems.
:-)
Sheesh.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Problem number one started by bringing in contractors. Contracts are best for short term trash and burn projects. This size of project needs to be done by government employees who don't need to answer to anyone and who will be around long enough to really know the system and maintain it over the system's lifecycle. A small team of programmers, admins, and a great project manager who will make it their career to see this sort of thing through is needed.
There is a real vaccum for talented contract employees too. Most folks are just sucked in by these body shops and then are asked to do jobs without any planning, good management, or experience. I know because I've been one! It sucks because your just a warm body to mop up cash for places like SAIC.
The Gov't needs to get off the contract wagon and bring in people who are willing to take ownership of what they do. And the Gov't shouldn't pay a dime to a contractor until the friggin thing works!!!
Well said; should I credit you if I rework it into a numbered list & append it to my development plan documents in the future?
Pi Ran Out
full disclosure: I wrote the "Who Killed the Virtual Case File" story for Spectrum, which ran last September.
Here's some more food for thought about the "reporting" behind the FBI story:
What's the news angle that warrants front page attention in the Post? That the Post reporters obtained the "unreleased" Aerospace report? Not news: the report was released to Spectrum at the end of April after nine months of litigating a Freedom of Information Act Request.
All the Post reporters had to do was google "virtual case file" and voila! the story pops up as number 1, right there for them to rewrite!
But say they are too lazy to bother googling. They just want the summary. The Spectrum article is the basis for the Wikipedia Entry on the Virtual Case File and the only external link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Case_File
The Spectrum article was the first and until the Post article, the only one to mention Matthew Patton, who was unearthed by dint of investigative reporting nowhere acknowledged in the Post article.
The Post article purports to turn a spotlight on SAIC, in part by quoting David Kay, the Iraq weapons inspector, who was a former SAIC VP--but who had absolutely no firsthand knowledge of the VCF project.
The Post article uncritcally takes FBI CIO Azmi's word that the follow up project Sentinel is on-budget and on-time, when other news outlets have recently reported about a growing sense within the FBI that this project is doomed to a fate similar to the VCF's.
Next time I watch 24 and see agents watching satellite images in realtime on their cellphones, I'll guffaw a little louder and think of this FBI thing.
Mr. Azmi should get the boot for this, and Mr Mueller a ten-hour-a-day, weeklong grilling on c-span, before being demoted to tape archivist. No, make that toilet cleaner.
I will send you the .mpp file :-)
Does anyone know of canned solutions? My experience has been that this is usually customized, but most police departments have a need.
"I love helping you /.ers out."
Can I borrow $50 from you?
Did anyone else pick up on this. from TFA: David Kay, a former SAIC senior vice president who did not work on the program but closely watched its development.... "SAIC was at fault because of the usual contractor reluctance to tell the customer, 'You're screwed up. You don't know what you're doing. This project is going to fail because you're not managing your side of the equation,' " said Kay, who later became the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq. A couple things here i dont get. 1. work for a company that contracts out to the US government. A company that as screwed the pooch since day 1. Then get a JOB from the US government. 2. what the hell does being a VP of a software company give you ANY ability what so ever as a weapons inspector??
MISSING - Sig file. 2 years old black and white and very funny. If found please email me.
Here is waht Zalmai Azmi, the FBI's top technology officer observed weeks before the project was finished:
==============
As far as Zalmai Azmi was concerned, the FBI's technological revolution was only weeks away.
It appeared to work beautifully. Until Azmi, now the FBI's technology chief, asked about the error rate.
Software problem reports, or SPRs, numbered in the hundreds
"A month before delivery, you don't have SPRs," Azmi said. "You're making things pretty. . . . You're changing colors."
===========
Either Zalmai Azmi, the FBI's top technology officer
1. Has no clue what his job description is
2. Has no clue about technology project management.
In either case, truly sad.
"Fix it"
This is how big government projects *should* be done. Hire a good contractor, set a minimum and then give bonuses for good performance and penalties for bad. Did the final tally cost a lot in bonuses? Yes. Was it worth it? Yes- they fixed a major problem in amazing time and did it correctly, plus they had a bunch of blue-collar folks make serious coin working triple time, all of which got plowed back into the local economy.
You can argue it wasn't on budget due to the bonuses, but it was assumed from the beginning they'd be paying out. Since the daily economic loss to LA was higher than the daily bonus for finishing early, I'd argue it was actually under budget.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
... as I am confident that they will remedy all previous problems by expanding the scope to encompass all of Homeland Security, in a gigantic multi-faceted morass of a system that will add a zero (or two) to the price tag and be awarded to Halliburton in yet another no-bid sweetheart deal. Just the disparate "security" requirements to isolate yet bind together the FBI, CIA, NSA, and FEMA will cause analysts' heads to spin so rapidly they snap off and go soaring into the blue. Testers will not be allowed to see the results of their tests due to lack of proper security clearances and a "need to know".
...)
If they really wanted to fix the problems at the FBI, do you think they would have rolled it into the largest bureaucracy in the government?
When you want to fix something that has problems, you isolate it so that the flaws stand out and can be remedied. If, on the other hand, you just want the flaws be not quite so visible, you roll it up inside something that stinks and bury it.
(why is it that we have such misnomers -- Homeland Security when there is none, The Patriot Act by those who are most assuredly *not* patriots,
I have 15 years in the private sector, and less time then that in the public sector.
There is less waste in the public sector then ANY corporation.
Almost all monies spent in the public sector are open for scrutiny(as it should be). There fore not only does everything that goes wrong available, it's available and often misinterpeted.
However, every dollar spent in a private orginization is very difficult to track, if at all.
Every, and I mean EVERY project I have seen given to contractors(private companies)for government work has gone over budget and missed many deadlines. I have never seen a project done soley by the government gone over budget, and rarely seen it go past a deadline. When it has gone past a deadline 6 out of 10 times it's because a private company has failed to deliver.
rule of thumb:
when a government agency has a success 9 out of ten times, the public only hears that 1 failure, when a corporation fails 9 out of ten times, you only hear of that ONE success.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I can tell you've never asked SAIC for a quote on a project.
managed project before.
He is right, and project I manage have never had more then 25 reports of bugs (non visual) a month before release.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
730K for $170 million? For the government, that is nothing. It is actually a pretty good price for that amount of code. It also seems like it was a pretty quick project too. And hundreds of SPRs a week before release? Not bad!
From my government contracting experience, none of this sounds that bad. Hopefully there is much more to the story that they aren't talking about. But from the examples they are using, SAIC's performance sounds distinctly "above average." It may have been a disaster, but TFA does not give us enough accurate information make that judgement.
More likely, they are just tools for the FBI's PR branch. As in:
FBI IT boss: "We need a new IT budget for a project that will really work, this time, we swear."
FBI director: "Errr, that's risky. The previous two were embarrasing failures."
PR manager: "Let's revive last year's VCFS story and put a "lesson learned" positive spin on it!"
FBI director: "Positive spin??? On a $170 million piece of crud? Come on! Who would be stupid enough to print it?"
PR manager: "You obviously haven't opened the Washington Post recently..."
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Classic boondoggle scenario.
I worked for [name deleted to protect the stupid] for 10 years, and $175MM is cheap compared to what we wasted on a few major IT projects that never went anywhere. It's not specific to Accenture, it's specific to bureaucracy, which is just as bad in large corporations as it is in the gubment.
It's hard to understand from TFA why Amzi still has a job, much less why he was promoted to CIO after being the special assistant to help straighten things out in the first place. Of course, I'm sure there are just as many non-IT people who should have been canned over this fiasco. (OK, I know that a CIO isn't necessarily an IT person.)
You can't just take a complex organization and turn it around 90 degrees without expecting trouble...
I wouldn't be at all surprised if 90% of the functionality could not be provided by secure web servers and good quality wiki.
But that would be cheap and quick to implement and not much chance of making a vast profit.
Heck, give me half that--$85 million--and I'll develop the friggin' system myself.
/rant
You'd probably think so, but I bet after the first few months of totally contradictory change requests, specification creep, and an utter lack of hard-and-fast acceptance criteria, that you'd throw up your hands, too.
You can blame the contractors all you want, but I've worked on a bunch of projects like this, and they almost always fail not because the developers weren't good or didn't know their stuff, but because there wasn't somebody on the client side who had the political (internal/office-politics, not Democrats/Republicans politics, although within the USG they're often related) capital to get all the little fiefdoms that exist inside a big organization and sit them down and say "Okay, Fuckheads: this is the system we're going to be using, this is how it's going to work, and you will use it."
Projects like this fail when you let every Tom, Dick and Harry start pushing features into it. I've seen situations where software is in the final stages of testing, and somebody decides that it would be fun to bring down the Big Boss to show them where all these millions of dollars have been spent. And the Boss will come down and take one look at the software, and immediately demand that something get changed. Often I don't think that they really care about what they're demanding, they just want to show off that they have the power to change shit, so they do.
It's stuff like that which pushes projects into failure, even if they look dead simple on paper. The problem isn't a software-engineering one, it's a customer-relations one. It's a problem of the people hiring the developers probably not having a good idea of what they wanted in software, and not having a single person in charge of it.
You can tell that happened with this FBI project, because it's obvious just from the summary that the CIO wasn't involved in the project throughout its lifecycle. He just seemingly walked in on it when it was a month away from deployment, at which point I'm sure everything was totally FUBAR. The way to have prevented this would have been to get somebody like that on board from the very beginning, who could have kicked ass and taken names and kept things under control.
Without good leadership on the client side, and a clear set of business processes, requirements, and acceptance criteria, it's not surprising that these large software projects fail as often as they do. However, as long as the failures are equally profitable to the development contracting companies as the successes, they have no problem taking on a contract even though they know the client is going to drive it into the ground and has no idea what they want.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Sure, I think we all feel that way after reading this story. But the error could also lie with the Agency. If they are constantly asking for changes and new additions, what can the programmers do.
It seems to me that the idea of doing software as a project is purely fiction. Everybody knows that software has bugs, everybody knows that new features are needed as the landscape changes, and everybody knows that software can be made better. So why do people insist on this flawed idea of a project?
I've come to realize that properly specifying software in advance is unrealistic. People have a tough time thinking through what they actually need a system to do - nobody really knows what they want until they realize that what you have is not it. Then, they'll gladly whine about what's missing.
So I've come to embrace Agile software development as my strategy.
At my small, ASP software company, we don't sell software, we sell its utility. We manage information for school districts, and take all the work out. We do backups, upgrades, maintenance, etc. so the school district can get back to what they do best - teach.
We do upgrades very rapid-fire - often releasing more than once per week. We have a big, huge list of stuff we'd like to do, and as we move forward, we develop whatever's the next most important thing on the list. The list comes primarily from customer whines. We charge hourly rates for development, and basically refuse to bid by the job.
This lets us be VERY flexible as we learn more about the actual needs of the districts we work with - often changing specifications as development is happening. We don't focus on making things "bug free". We focus on fixing bugs rapidly, particularly when they cause a problem for the end user. This lets us get to what's actually needed by the customer FAST. And they LOVE IT!!!
An interesting side-effect of this methodology is that "feature creep" basically disappears - unnecessary features get pushed off because, even if they're cool, they're not what's "needed next" and so get filtered out.
When a change is needed, there's a simple evaluation of "is this important enough to do next?", and this evaluation filters out the crap ideas. Thus, problems like feature creep, bloat, and design by committee, effectively disappear as problems.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Let's face it, there are lots of problems here:
So what's the solution? Fire the Management responsible for this project.
Management is paid specifically for successful delivery of the project. If they do not deliver the project, they have failed. If they have not been fired, what incentive do they have to make this project succeed? If they cannot be fired, then we've found the fundamental flaw.
You reap what you sow here. If you the taxpayers want union-protected workers who are nearly impossible to fire, then you will get workers who will not be accountable. As long as the rules in government are focused on survival then government workers will continue to CYA (cover your ass), defer decisions and blow money to protect their current position/empire.
And don't blame the government employees here, they're playing the game. The public set the rules and employees play by the rules. People are fired for not playing by the rules. If you feel that the wrong people are (not) being fired, then request that rules of the game be changed. You reap what you sow.
Large bureaucratic problems are not solved by contracting out to large, bureaucratic companies. They are solved by small to mid-sized teams working closely with the Agency to assure that 1) everything actually works and 2) the system meets the Agency's needs. Large vendors and consultancies are pressed to deliver quickly and are too scared of losing their next contract to tell the Agency "Hey! This won't have a chance in hell of working!" Smaller teams and companies, while still pressed hard on delivery, generally have the customers' best interests in mind and are willing to tell them when something is wrong.
I can't imagine something like this costing over $100 million dollars. Yes, I realize the importance, complexity, and scale, of the system but, still, $100 million? No way! Just another example of what should be considered criminal activity by a company: bilking the government for all it can just because they can. Such a system could be easily developed for under $5 million dollars and in a year or less by a good, solid team. Cut all the bureaucracy out, focus on the customer (the FBI), and just *work*.
This system could be a vital tool in the war on terror and in crime management in general. Contractors need to take this stuff seriously. It's about more than *just* money. It's about national defense and homeland security (yes, I know, I know). I suppose I'm ranting because I am just tired of seeing this absolute incompetence run rampant through government and I'm tired of watching company after company steal taxpayer dollars by exploiting that incompetence.
I'm sending a letter to Director Mueller and Mr. Amzi today offering a team to do the work for a very fair and affordable price. My team won't be motivated by greed or dollar sign filled eyes but rather by a sense of national pride and a strong desire to really help in the war on crime.
I just wish more companies acted on those things. Revamping all these agencies would be a piece of cake and a LOT more affordable.
-- Anonymous
... they should distribute copies of "The Mythical Man-Month".
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
Ooo, me, me, me Sir! Is the contractor Siemens?
Strangely enough I've just finished building a demo flash site for a major Japanese company. It's totally flawed but I love to take the money! I don't think it will go live but, damn!, they love to waste money. I mean would you pay $2000 for someone to crop a QT movie? They did, heh heh.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Yeah, having been in this same situation this sounds about right. I wouldn't say they were "too scared" though. It sounds like they knew that were getting paid regardless of the outcome of the project, and it was a lot less work to simply cash in while they gave the agency enough rope to hang themselves. What reason did they have for doing the real work of execution when they could simply milk the cow?
Slices, dices, eats your lunch.
I'm sure many of you have seen this.
Consulting
If you're not part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem.
I heard that the new system wouldn't run the beta version of Duke Nukem Forever - so they had to scrap the whole thing and start over from scratch. But that's okay - the DNF people have just done the same (for the 8th time).
"But this one goes to 11!"
It's nice to see a collection of /. posts containing nothing but sweet love, instead of all the bitter hatred, cursing, and anger that I typically see.
Sorry to be an anonymous coward but I saw this and had to post before even joining. Highways are the most annoying government projects. I have been driving on I-80 in NJ for the entirety of the summer for work, and there has been construction going on, where the only tangible change I have seen is various machines and vehicles moved from spot to spot. Stupid "This is what your tax dollar is going into" To what? None of those workers care, its a government contract, they sit there and do nothing. THere hasnt been a single time (and I get into the office at funky hours during the day) that I havent seen them sitting on the overpass eating. It's all they do, and I'm paying them to do so. WTF MATE??
Of all the stupid ideas, using old technology to preserve information is the stupidist. By that logic, we should make the FBI carve their records in stone tablets! Except that wouldn't work either, since stone tablets be destroyed or misplaced, just as paper can be shredded, have coffee spilled on it, or just misfiled. It is, in fact, much easier to hide an incriminating record in a warehouse full of cardboard boxes than it is to hide an electronic record in a database.
If you want to preserve records, you need to put some sort of system in place that makes it hard to destroy or lose them. That's true no matter how primitive your record system is. In fact, technology is your friend. You might, for example, simply require that ever record have a copy filed with an outside authority. Which is absurdly expensive for paper records, but trivial for electronic ones.
Everybody has too much faith in paper. Right now, California is going through a big hassle because of a law that requires a paper copy of every ballot. As if nobody ever fixed an election based on paper ballots!
How long have you worked in journalism, Susan?
If someone else does a story, especially a big story like yours, a magazine/newspaper has two options:
1. Reprint your story. Credit you. Pay your organisation money. Look, to their readers, like schmucks because they missed a big story.
Or, and here's what usually happens:
2. Match the story. Re-interview the same sources. Go over the same ground. And then publish a very similar story. This way you not only VERIFY that the original story is true and well reported, but you appear to your readers as if you're out there getting the news.
Shoddy lazy journalism? No. That would have been uncritically reprinting your original story.
They just "matched" it. That's the industry term. As a stringer for many years (a "stringer" is a type of freelance journalist) I was called by editors many, many times to "match" stories.
You've worked in journalism for, what, a week now? Welcome to the industry. You may want to check with some people in your organisation who've been around the block a few times before firing off embarrassing (to you) letters to the Post Ombudsman.
- municipal police department (millions of citizens)
- thousands of incidents per day, of which hundreds are
- criminal offenses (100s per day) each offense consisting of data on
- suspects
- witnesses
- victims
- officers
- leads
- automobiles, boats, other vehicles (stolen, lost, used in crime, etc.)
- goods, securities, monies, etc. (stolen, lost, etc.)
- narrative descriptions from the above of what happened
- later supplementary narrative of investigation
- thousands of officers assigned
- department organized by divisions, beats, special squads,etc. (which are periodically reorganized)
- legal geographic management desired (so PD knows if call is inside/outside legal jurisdiction area)
- management reports desired
- Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) standard statistics reporting mandatory
- National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) if possible
- tying into the above, audit trail of changes & who made them, security management of data (e.g., so suspeneded employess can't see data, only certain employees can see confidential, narcotics data, etc., employees can't snoop other employees' personal data, etc.)
- tracking of towed vehicles, impounded goods
- tracking of impounded evidence for cases
- tracking of evidence through criminal laboratory processing, including outside state or federal (FBI) processing
- interchange of data with other governmental entities (e.g., FBI, BATF, etc.) desirable
personnel management
The last item is optional.Does anyone know of any vendors selling such solutions? My experience has been that this is usually customized, but many police departments have a serious need.
I didn't see anywhere that they accepted fixes on the software that was buggy to try to solve the problems they were having. FBI never does things cheaply. A good network of Linux boxes with simple software programming done at a fraction of the cost would of solved all of their problems. Why won't the FBI listen to us slashdotters? We know what's best for them. :)
that is bad news as some heads start to roll.
but it will not help in getting FBI to achieve paperless office & be more productive.
-----
:-)
'A month before delivery, you don't have SPRs,' Azmi said. 'You're making things pretty. . . . You're changing colors.'"
-----
If it's a month before delivery and you don't have ANY bugs to fix then you didn't implement enough features or you over scheduled your milestones
I'd just like to point out that InfoWorld covered this story extensively last year.
Breakfast served all day!
who the hell moderates these things up?
I know this is a nitpick -- I fully agree that clients often don't appreciate how serious some bugs are, but I don't think it'd be unreasonable for a client to want to prioritise the look of a report over making the query 10% faster. Really it'd come down to how critical the exact-ness of the template is. If it's a government organisation, for instance, there might be legislation in place that says it has to be a certain format or a law's being broken. Or it might just be an eyesore to look at. You really can't know without talking to the customer or reading the specs (if they've been well authored).
If the query was returning the wrong data, or if it took orders of magnitude longer to run than it needed to, it'd definitely be worth looking at first as a serious bug. Really though, if it's a report that a user has to sit and wait for anyway, 10% longer running time behind their other tasks probably won't have nearly as much impact on their work day as having to use a report that looks different from how they need it to look. If it's a report that runs nearly instantaneously, 10% difference is nothing anyway.
That would be great.
Remember to fill out your SPR reports...
Isn't it typical that 'Inefficiency' is just a smoke screen for funneling huge amounts of cash into 'undocumented' government projects?
To paraphrase a line from the X-Files, do you really think the government pays $750 for a hammer?
Inefficiency assumes that the goal was to complete a working system.
The project efficiently succeeded in making millions of tax dollars vanish.
Obviously those millions were not sufficient, and additional funding will be needed to make such a project a success. Congress will have to double the IT budget for the FBI if they ever want they system to get past the Beta stage. Triple the budget for getting to run version 1.0.
Since Depew was skilled enought to write his own PC -based DBMS, the FBI decided that he should be put in charge of a multi-million dollar project. This also was a SNAFU. Writing a PC program doesn't qualify you to manage a huge software project.
One of the least known problems in law enforcement is keeping officers and agents focused on their work. They'd much rather take classes in programming, set up websites, build Access databases for the Captain, or in general do anything rather than get out on the street and do policing or legal work. The problem is, no matter what they do, they get the same pay. Policing or tracking down leads requires footwork and is physically demanding, so most veteran agents prefer a desk job.
Find the personnel roster of the various organizations (including NYC Emergency Operations Center) from the former World Trade Center Building #7, and compare it to the personnel roster from S.A.I.C.
Notice any duplicate names popping up???? "Coincidence" -- it's called a money transfer - seemingly yet another crappy government job, but easy money.....
The trouble with project managers (and security people) is that they have a checklist mentality.
PM: Have you done this as yet.
You: No, there is no need for it
PM: But I need to get it checked off on my plan
You: It shouldn't be on the plan in the first place
PM: But it is on the plan, so I need to get it checked off. When are you going to do it.
Seeing you are talking directly to the project manager, I can only assume that for some reason you're a senior developer.
If you sit down to program x and y makes more logical sense, you need to go talk to your project advisor before you code y, not after. Even worse, the fact that x wasn't needed at all, and you didn't approach your project manager.
If a product continually gets the development process logic messed up, or the basic design of a product contains stuff that is un-needed, and you only tell the PM after you've fixed it, you are actually doing yourself a disservice and creating more work for yourself.
I mean, basically you are creating and environment where the Project Manager, and thus the reset of the stakeholders, are constantly playing catch up to developers as they hack and change things on the fly. That kind of behaviour anywhere else in business would be regarded, at best, as unprofessional.
'A month before delivery, you don't have SPRs,' Azmi said. 'You're making things pretty. . . . You're changing colors.'"
So that is what Microsoft are doing with Vista. We should have known!
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
This isn't to say that you couldn't develop a wiki over an RDBMS. It's just that, if you do, then there's no difference between the two (wiki vs [HTTP forms]).
This is a hugely insightful post IMO.
It's an example of unprofessionalism.
"What the government does, the government fucks up." ... I thought this was an Abbie Hoffman quote, but I haven't been able to find it. The more you find out about any government operation, the more you see how true that is.
btw, I corrected the spelling of "Inefficiency".
Most people don't even think inside the box.
The failure of a effort with the scope of an enterprise-wide project like this in an organization that is clearly "immature" from a project management, technology-management, and IT systems, processes and development standpoint should surprise no one. Never mind achieving enterprise application integration.
Every Fortune 1000 company has hurtled down this obstacle course and has the scars to prove it. It is an expensive journey, but there doesn't seem to be any way around it. As some say, "Pay now or pay later." Multiple iterations of large projects are the norm, not the exception and I believe are an inevitable learning curve that can't be avoided - a rite of passage so to speak. The only disconnect in the FBI's project was thinking that it could be done right the first time at any cost or in any timeframe.
Why? Because half the issues are cultural and derive from the dynamics of the organization which needed to change after 9/11. No vendor or project manager or JAD team can solve for that - they were caught in the middle of a paradigm and culture shift that they had no control over and may not even have been fully aware of or able to articulate and document. The fact that their JAD sessions lasted 6 months is surely proof enough that the organization wasn't ready to talk to IT developers.
Setting aside the lapses in personal competence (e.g. great effort to collect trinkets and souvenirs for scrapbooks while putting a value judgement on valid criticism and calling it "disruptive"), at the end of the day, you can't design what you can't conceive. They didn't know what they didn't know. Now, somewhat older and wiser, perhaps they know quite a bit more, but I doubt they (the FBI organization) know enough to get it right.
One of the "graybeards" in the IEEE article predicts it will be 2010 or 2011. But that will only be the second time. I say it will be more like 2015 for a third try before they will really know with any confidence what they actually knew about the hijackers before 9/11 and have enterprise application systems that are world class and interoperable both within the FBI and externally with other intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
They should have the agents keep blogs,
put it all on their internal web,
and let Google search it for them.
Not perfect, but it would be quick, cheap, and probably get them 90% of what they need.