The Federal Bureau of Investigation of the U.S
The Federal Bureau of Investigation of the U.S. government, the
FBI, was forced to scrap its $170 million virtual case file (VCF)
management system. Official reports blamed numerous delays, cost
overruns, an incompatible software. But a deeper examination of the
cause of this failure uncovered issues of control, culture , and
incompatible organizational systems.
Among its many duties, the FBI is charged with the responsibility
to fight crime and terrorism. TO do so requires a large number of
agents located within the United States and around the world. That
means agents must be able to share information among themselves
within the bureau and with other federal, state and local law
enforcement agencies. But sharing information has never been a
standard operation procedure for the agency. According to one
source, “agents are accustomed to holding information close to
their bulletproof vests and scorn the idea of sharing information”.
This turned out to be a real problem in an investigation of
DarkMarket, an Internet forum that connected buyers and sellers so
they could exchange stolen information such as bank detail and
credit card numbers. When both the FBI and Secret Service agents
were investigating each other as criminals, it took British
colleagues, who knew the secrets of both agencies, to avert the
crisis.
Enter the FBI’s efforts to modernize its infrastructure, codebamed
“Trilogy”. The efforts included providing agents with 30,000
desktops PCs, high-bandwidth networks to connect FBI locations
around the world, and the VCF would provide “an electronic means of
agents to globally send field notes, documents pieces of
intelligence and other evidence so they could hopefully act faster
on leads.” It was designed to replace a paper-intensive process
with an electronic, Web-based process. With such a reasonable goal
why didn’t it work?
The CIO of the FBI offered on explanation. He claimed that the FBI
needed to change its culture. “If the Bureau is ever going to get
the high-tech analysis and surveillance tools it needs to… fight
terrorism, we must move from a decentralized amalgam of 56 field
offices… to a seamlessly integrated global intelligence operation
capable of sharing information and preventing crimes in real-time.”
He added that the Bureau personnel were also very distrustful of
the technology, as well as other not only in other organizations
but also within the FBI.
A former project manager at the FBI further explained. “They work
under the idea that everything needs to be kept secret. But
everything doesn’t have to be kept a secret. To do this right, you
have to share information”.
The VCF system has been shut down system has been shut down, but
the CIO is working on a new approach. He is busy trying to win
buy-in from agents in the field so that the next case management
plan will cover all the FBI’s IT projects, even those begun in
decentralized offices. His team has been designing an enterprise
architecture that will lay out standards for a bureau wide
information system. The Director of the FBI has helped too. He
recognized the governance of IT, taking its budget control away
from the districts and giving total IT budget authority to the
CIO.
The FBI is building a new case management system called Sentinel in
four phases. The first two have been deployed and , according to
the Federal IT dashboard, the project is on schedule and on budget.
The new system, according to the CIO, will include workflow,
document management, record management, audit trails, access
control, and single sign-on. It will provide enhanced information
sharing, search, and analysis capabilities to the FBI agents and
facilitate information sharing with members of the law enforcement
and intelligence communities. To manage the expectations of the
agents, the CIO plans to communicate often and significantly
increase the training program for the new system. The CIO
commented, “we want to automate those things that are the most
manually cumbersome for the agents so they can see that technology
can actually enhance their productivity. That is how to change
their attitudes.”
The FBI also has a billion-dollar Next Generation Identification
(NGI) system with 52 million searchable facial images and 100
million individual fingerprints records as well as millions of palm
prints, DNA samples, and iris scans. NGI can scan mug shots for a
match and pick out suspects from a crowd scanned by a security
camera or in a photograph on the Internet. The information can be
exchanged with 18,000 law enforcement agencies 24 hour a day, 365
days a year. When combined with Sentinel, NGI will further enhance
the effectiveness of the FBI’s antiterror efforts.
1. What do you think were the real reasons why the VCF system
failed?
2. What were the points of alignment and misalignment between
the information systems strategy and the FBI organization?
3. What do you think of the CIO ’ s final comment about how to
change attitudes? Do you think it will work? Why or why not?
4. If you were the CIO, what would you do to help the FBI
modernize and make better use of information technology?
