Justice IG casts further doubts on FBI's Sentinel

The FBI knowingly accepted faulty software from Lockheed Martin as part of the bureau's effort to create a web-based investigative case management system, finds a Justice Department inspector general report released March 31.

Auditors wrote they now doubt the effort, called Sentinel, can be completed in a timely and cost-effective manner. As of March 15, the bureau was working without cost or schedule completion estimates, earlier assessments having fallen apart. FBI officials acknowledged to auditors that the project is on track to bust its $451-million price tag and likely cannot be completed until 2011, at least 11 weeks overdue.

FBI Director Robert Mueller announced March 17 that work on Sentinel's second of four phases needed additional time and that the bureau would postpone starting most of the third and all of the fourth phases.

Matters started going downhill when the FBI conditionally accepted, in December 2009, software from Lockheed Martin as part of Sentinel's second phase of development. That functionality was meant to provide three electronic documents, support their workflow, and transfer all administrative cases from the Automated Case File, the current system based on an old ADABAS database.  

At the time, the FBI told Lockheed Martin to correct 26 critical performance and usability issues it uncovered during a user test conducted in November, allocating to the company an additional $780,000 to do so.

Among the problems: One tester said it took more than 4 minutes to attach a picture file to an electronic form and the process couldn't be interrupted. Rendering a blank form and saving a completed one took over more than half a minute. "Moreover, 82 percent of the testers stated that the Sentinel capabilities they tested would make the completion of the related tasks 'much harder' than current FBI practices," the audit states.

The software did successfully migrate all of the bureau's administrative cases stored in ACS--2 percent of the data in ACS--in four days. At that rate, it could take up to 200 days to migrate all ACS data into Sentinel, the report quotes independent verification and validation staff as stating. Data migration, while not one of the 26 defects identified by the FBI, is an "area of major concern," according to auditors.

Another area of major concern is the way Lockheed Martin prioritizes defects. It does so, not by how much it affects users' ability to do their job, but based "on whether they affect Lockheed Martin's ability to satisfy a requirement," auditors say.

Also, earned value management reports have been delayed and turnover in the program office was 26 percent from December 2008 through October 2009, the report notes.

This is the second attempt by the FBI to replace ACS; the last effort, called Virtual Case File and primed by SAIC, collapsed in 2005 after $105 million had been spent, without results.

For more:
- check out the Justice Department inspector general report (.pdf)

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