The FBI says it can finish its troubled Sentinel project for $20 million and within 12 months--despite having already spent nearly 90 percent of its $451 million budget, and despite also being two years behind schedule and having completed, at best, two of the four phases of Sentinel's development.

Also, the FBI says it can do so despite a planned reduction in contract employees from 220 to 40, and a reduction in bureau employees working on Sentinel from 30 to 12--in total, a 67 percent reduction of personnel from current levels.

Sentinel is the bureau's second attempt to create a web-based investigative case management system to replace the antiquated Automated Case Support system in use today. The prime contractor is Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT), which won a contract award for Sentinel in 2006. The previous attempt to sweep aside ACS, called the Virtual Case File, collapsed in 2005 after the FBI had spent $105 million on unusable software code.

Completion of Sentinel under this new FBI plan would require skipping a planned migration of data from ACS, but even so, the FBI's new plan for Sentinel "appears optimistic," says a Justice Department inspector general report released Oct. 20.

The FBI's new approach, outlined in the report, would make use of agile development. That approach would "reduce our reliance on traditional contractors and allow for cost-savings by dealing directly with product experts," said FBI Associate Deputy Director T.J. Harrington in a public letter, also dated Oct. 20, critical of the report.  

The inspector general "expresses 'significant concern' about the FBI's new plan, yet it offers no alternative," Harrington wrote.

Among the concerns raised in the report--apart from the FBI's schedule and budget estimates and the personnel drawdown--are that even by skipping the step of migrating ACS data into Sentinel, some difficult tasks would nonetheless remain, such as digital workflow.

So far, the Sentinel contractor has managed to automate four business processes, or half of the processes targeted for conversion into electronic workflow by the end of the second of Sentinel's four phases. FBI officials told auditors it anticipates formally accepting phase 2 from Lockheed Martin in mid-October, after having already conditionally accepted delivery of the software last December.

But not even the four processes delivered as part of phase 2 are fully automated, the report says. Agents can use Sentinel to generate forms for the four processes in question, which are "report of information that may become the subject of testimony," "import form," "lead request form," and "electronic communication form."

But, agents must then print the forms to obtain approval signatures and keep the hard copies on file.

"Sentinel largely remains a more user-friendly way to search ACS rather than the state of the art, stand-alone case management system that it was envisioned to provide by now," the report adds.

Other challenges to the FBI's new approach include no bureau experience with agile development and the fact that that keeping ACS online (a consequence of not migrating its data over to Sentinel) could prove "costly and problematic given the volume of the data and the FBI's inexperience with that approach," the report states.

For more:
- download the DOJ inspector general report (.pdf)
- download Harrington's letter criticizing the report (.pdf)
- go to a reaction to the report from Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.)

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