Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Virtual Case File System

Overview

This case study presents system and software engineering issues encountered in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Virtual Case File (VCF) project in the period 2000-2005. VCF development was abandoned in 2005 after over $170 million had been spent.

Domain Background

The FBI is an organization within the United States Department of Justice consisting of 23 divisions, including counterintelligence, criminal investigation, and cybercrime. The bureau's 12,400 agents investigate everything from counterterrorism leads to kidnappings. They interview witnesses, develop informants, conduct surveillance, hunt for clues, and collaborate with local law enforcement to find and arrest criminals. Agents document every step and methodically build case files. They spend a tremendous amount of time processing paperwork. This system of forms and approvals stretches back to the 1920s when forms for all of the bureau's investigative reports were standardized.

In 2000 the Bureau had hundreds of standardized paper forms and obsolete IT systems. The FBI’s 13 000 computers could not run modern software. Most of the agency offices were connected to the FBI intranet with links operating at about the speed of a 56-kilobit-per-second modem. Agents couldn't e-mail U.S. Attorneys, federal agencies, local law enforcement, or each other; instead, they typically sent case-related information by fax. The agency’s problems in 2000 were summarized in the 9/11 Commission Report: "the FBI's information systems were woefully inadequate. The FBI lacked the ability to know what it knew; there was no effective mechanism for capturing or sharing its institutional knowledge."

In September 2000, Congress approved $380 million over three years for what was then called the FBI Information Technology Upgrade Program. Eventually divided into three parts, the program became known as the Trilogy Information Technology Modernization Program. The first part would provide all 56 FBI field offices with new PCs running Microsoft Office, as well as new scanners, printers, and servers. In the second part the FBI intranet would be reimplemented to provide secure local area and wide area networks, allowing agents to share information with their supervisors and each other. The third part was intended to replace the FBI's investigative software applications, including ACS.

In June 2001, the FBI awarded a contract to develop the investigative software applications of Trilogy to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) over a three year period. The purpose of the software to be developed was to:

• provide the capability to find information in FBI databases without having prior knowledge of its location, and to search all FBI databases with a single query through the use of search engines;

• web-enable the existing investigative applications;

• improve capabilities to share information inside and outside the FBI;

• provide access to authorized information from both internal and external databases; and

• allow the evaluation of cases and crime patterns through the use of commercial and FBI-enhanced analytical and case management tools.

After the September 11 terrorist attacks, the inability of FBI agents to share the most basic information about Al Qaeda's U.S. activities was front-page news. Within days, the FBI's obsolete technology infrastructure was being discussed in Congress and the FBI was under intense pressure to improve its information sharing capabilities. On September 4, 2001 Robert S. Mueller III became FBI director, and in the face of intense public and congressional pressure, Mueller shifted Trilogy into high gear. The planned three year period to develop the investigative software was considered politically unacceptable. In January 2002, the FBI requested an additional $70 million to accelerate Trilogy; Congress went further, approving $78 million.

Providing web-enablement of the existing but antiquated and limited ACS system would not provide the investigative case management capabilities required to meet the FBI’s post-September 11 mission. In December 2001, the FBI asked SAIC to stop building a Web front end for the old programs. Instead, SAIC was asked to devise a new case management system, the Virtual Case File, to replace ACS. The VCF would contain a major new application, database, and graphical user interface. In order to make both criminal and terrorist investigation information readily accessible throughout the FBI, major changes to the standardized FBI processes would be required. This case study focuses on the VCF component of the Trilogy program.

Analysis of Case Study

The most complete description of the development of the VCF is the report by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General; the Office of the Inspector General reports to the Attorney General and is independent of the FBI organizations responsible for the Trilogy program. The introduction to the report states “We conducted this audit to assess the FBI’s progress in meeting cost, schedule, technical, and performance targets for the three components of Trilogy. We also examined the extent to which Trilogy will meet the FBI’s current and longer-term IT needs.”

An IEEE Spectrum article complements the OIG audit report by providing detail on how the VCF requirements were developed, the contractor’s activities, and project management failures by both the FBI and the contractor. The contractor’s viewpoint is presented in testimony given before a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee.

These materials, in total, provide a comprehensive view of the VCF program and the reasons for its failure.

Case Study Description

The fate of the VCF program was sealed before the first line of software code was written. The reasons for its failure are associated with the non-use or misuse of numerous system engineering practices, especially establishing stakeholder value (SEBoK 2.5.1), stakeholder requirements (SEBoK 3.3.1), system requirements (SEBoK 3.3.2) , planning (SEBoK 3.6.1 ), assessment and control (SEBoK 3.6.2) ,and risk management(SEBoK 3.6.3).

In the political environment following the 9/11 attacks, funding for the VCF project was never a problem. SAIC and the FBI committed by early 2002 to creating an entirely new case management system in 22 months. Unlimited funding enabled the project to keep rolling at full speed in spite of the problems being encountered. The scheduling for the Virtual Case File project focused on what was desired, not what was possible. According to one report on the project, “Trilogy’s scope grew by about 80 percent since initiation of the project.”

The FBI cycled through 5 people in the Chief Information Officer role in 4 years and most decisions were made by committees. In order to compress the schedule, the FBI even proposed replacing the ACS with the VCF over a weekend using an IT procedure called a “flash cutover.” Basically, people would log off from ACS on Friday and log on to the new system on Monday. Once the cutover happened, there was no going back, even if it turned out that the VCF didn't work.

SAIC worked under a cost-plus-award-fee type of contract for Trilogy since the scope of the project was undefined in early 2002 when work began on the VCF. Given the intense time pressure, no one at the FBI believed there was time to develop the requirements, validate them with the various FBI user communities, and then estimate the cost and time required to develop the VCF. The SAIC contract did not require specific completion milestones, and the cost plus contract enabled the scope to increase. VCF was a case of not getting the requirements sufficiently defined in terms of completeness and correctness. The continuous redefinition of requirements had a cascading effect on what had already been designed and produced. Once there was any demonstrable software, change requests started arriving—roughly 400 from December 2002 to December 2003.

The new FBI intranet was specified during 2001 before the start of the VCF project and with little understanding of the network traffic that would result from information sharing. By early 2003 the FBI began to realize how taxing the network traffic would be once all 22 000 users came online using their new PCs. The requirements for the FBI intranet were modified based on the “guestimates” of the bandwidth that would be required when the VCF was fully operational. By early 2004 the new FBI intranet was in operation although the VCF software was far from complete.

In reaction to the time pressure, SAIC broke its VCF development group into eight teams, working in parallel on different functional pieces of the program, in order to finish the job faster. But the eight threads would later prove too difficult for SAIC to combine into a single system. By the time VCF was cancelled SAIC had developed over 700,000 lines of software based upon an incomplete set of requirements that were documented in an 800-page volume.

Summary

The OIG summarizes its conclusions as:

“Various reasons account for the delays and associated cost increases in the Trilogy project, including:

• poorly defined and slowly evolving design requirements,

• contracting weaknesses,

• IT investment management weaknesses,

• lack of an Enterprise Architecture,

• lack of management continuity and oversight,

• unrealistic scheduling of tasks,

• lack of adequate project integration, and

• inadequate resolution of issues raised in our previous reports on Trilogy.”

“According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an Enterprise Architecture is a set of descriptive models such as diagrams and tables that define, in business and technology terms, how an organization operates today, how it intends to operate in the future, and how it intends to invest in technology to transition from today's operational environment to tomorrow's.”

“As of early 2005 the FBI’s operations remain significantly hampered due to the poor functionality and lack of information-sharing capabilities of its current IT systems.”

In May 2005 FBI director Mueller announced Sentinel, a four-phase, four-year project intended to do the VCF's job and provide the bureau with a Web-based case- and records-management system that incorporates commercial off-the-shelf software. During the previous five years commercial case management software had become available. A report by the OIG in late 2009 describes Sentinel and its status at that time. News reports indicate that the FBI expects Sentinel to be completed in 2012.

References

Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Justice, “Sentinel Audit V: Status of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Case Management System,” Audit Report 10-03, November 2009.

Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Justice, “The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Management of the Trilogy Information Technology Project,” Audit Report 05-07, February, 2005.

http://www.justice.gov/oig/reports/FBI/a0507

IEEE Spectrum: “Who Killed the Virtual Case File?” Harry Goldstein, September 2005.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/who-killed-the-virtual-case-file

Testimony by Arnold Punaro, Executive Vice President, Science Applications International Corporation to the Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, State and the Judiciary, U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations, February 3, 2005.

http://www.justice.gov/oig/reports/FBI/a1003_redacted.pdf

Citations

List all references cited in the article. Note: SEBoK 0.5 uses Chicago Manual of Style (15th ed). See the BKCASE Reference Guidance for additional information.

Primary References

All primary references should be listed in alphabetical order. Remember to identify primary references by creating an internal link using the ‘’’reference title only’’’ (title). Please do not include version numbers in the links.

Additional References

All additional references should be listed in alphabetical order.

Article Discussion

[Go to discussion page]