"Freeze! This is the FBI! We have no intelligence!"
The IT disaster for the FBI is a good example of an epic project failure. The entire project was named Trilogy, which had three parts which entailed enterprise wide upgrades in hardware, networking, and software involving case information.
Four years and half a billion dollars later, Trilogy provided little benefit to the FBI. The software included in the project, Virtual Case File (VCF), maybe the biggest IT disaster in history, essentially "[a] train wreck in slow motion."
Without VCF, the FBI had its mainframe-based Automatic Case Support (ACS). Before Trilogy was the User Applications Component (UAC) to "Webify" five applications that were picked only because they were the most commonly used. This was a significant mistake. Then the September 11 attacks came that changed the course of development for VCF.
The FBI did not have the technical staff to do the project and soon outsourced to DynCorp and Science Application International Corporation (SAIC). After the September 11 attacks, the FBI was reshaped to deal with intelligence in addition to law enforcement, therefore the UAC requirements changed to a collaborative environment for evidence and intelligence.
The FBI told SAIC to start over with no requirements and SAIC would need to help them with it. This is called "flash cutover" and is very risky.
SAIC had a cost-plus award contract. "[T]hese types of contracts estimate the real cost of a project and add a profit margin that is awarded annually to the contractor -- in full, in part, or not at all, depending on the government's rating of the contractor's performance for that year … In the beginning, you never want to say no, because you'll get a bad rating. It essentially incents the contractor to be much more accepting of out-of-scope changes. It's kind of like a mass-suicide pact, except you're hoping a miracle is going to occur later on."
SAIC delivered an incomplete system for evaluation. The new CIO of the FBI, the fifth one in four years, determined to pin down a set of requirements that was performance based and created a two track plan. SAIC would deliver an initial operating capability (IOC).
The IOC met all the requirements, yet the FBI CIO still had objections to the software. In fact, there were other components of the IOC that were simply turned off.
The fun is not over yet. At this point, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security were working on a Federal Investigative Case Management System (FICMS) that renders VCF obsolete. If the contract is awarded, VCF will be abandoned. Case closed.
This article was written in 2005. I do not know what happened after this.
