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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.'"
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?
That quote was just too funny. In any huge huge huge project the state of play a month before is usually going through the thousands of trouble reports, deciding which features you will turn off so you can ge the release out, figuring out work arounds for the rest of them, discovering that the analysis was flawed on some functions and of course by now you ditched many other features because the analysis was not done at all. And yes you change a few icon colors to keep key users happy and get your sign-off. This is for a successful 1.0 implementation.
It really sounds as though the FBI needs a real IT department of their own, not the isolated geeks helping out Mulder and Scully. And, if some "CIO" type waddles in and recommends another outsourcing, maybe the sidearm arguement should be used.
Outsource, and this is what you get. They must hire MBA's. Really, sensitive government data projects like this one should never be outsourced, if only for national security reasons.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
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
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.
The problem isn't really that it's someone else's money, cause that's true at all companies. How much of your company's market cap did you or your boss or your boss's boss put in? In most cases, approximately 0 - it's Wall Street's money, which means it's millions of pension-payers' money rather than millions of tax-payers' money.
The driving problem is the rigidness and stagnation of the government's bureaucracy. The impulse to build this kind of lumbering bureaucracy was a good one - it's called civil service, and it's basically a way to insulate long-term government functions from short-term politicians, keep government employees from becoming the minions of whichever politician wants to build a personal empire. There's no question that the limitations of that approach are killing government. On the other hand, do you really want a civil service that can be downsized or force to work on producing bogus intelligence so we can invade 17 more countries? Or a government whose job is to buy as many copies of Microsoft Vapor Server as it can possibly cram into an appropriations bill? The idea that the government is fundamentally incapable is a useless one, sorta like existentialism, in that it fails to answer the question of what we DO as a result of that insight. Do you seriously propose that the FBI be run by a private interest? I'd rather not have someone like Verizon or ChoicePoint watching my back, thank you - at least the government has a mandate to protect people and not just make money off of them. And there's a name for the head of an large private armed force: warlord.
The article touches on the fact that government has progressively become a comparatively worse place to work than the private sector, because of the bureaucracy and because the salaries don't keep pace with the private sector. A friend of mine is working on Sentinel, and he's been really surprised to find an FBI-side partner who actually wants to oversee the work. If you do think that police work at the federal level should be the job of government, then how do we go about really fixing the FBI?
Government is what citizens make it. And here's the rub: under the past 25 years of leadership of the small-government zealots, we managed to prevent government from making important investments - e.g.: roads (any idea how many bridges in this country haven't been maintained in decades, and what the long-term maintenance will cost on the vast numbers of roads we've built?), emergency planning, a healthy population, an educated workforce, etc. These investments are the infrastructure on which the economy is built. And this stellar leadership has not only managed to give short shrift to the future, but it's utterly failed to address the real problems they correctly identified with government. Anti-government conservatism is a bankrupt ideology - it's nice to kick the government for it's failures real and perceived, but when push comes to shove, it offers no real alternative for building the public underpinnings of our economy and our lives, just faith that the free market fairy will come fix all our problems. We live in an extraordinarily pragmatic age: one where you can assemble data on a large scale to decide if something works or doesn't. It's time to stop carping and give our government a mandate to do this and find its way out of quandaries like the civil service vs. Tamany Hall problem.
Sorry for the rant. Somebody talk to me about fixing the FBI.