Anatomy of an IT disaster: How the FBI blew it

The Bureau's foiled plan for a modern IT infrastructure is a tragic case of project mismanagement

By Eric Knorr
March 21, 2005

Some FBI agents ruefully refer to the trilogy project, a massive initiative to modernize the FBI's aging technology infrastructure, as the "Tragedy" project. It certainly has all the earmarks of tragedy: the best intentions, catastrophic miscommunication, staggering waste.

Trilogy, as the name suggests, had three parts: an enterprisewide upgrade of desktop hardware and software; deployment of a modern network infrastructure; and an integrated suite of software for entering, finding, sharing, and analyzing case information. In a congressional hearing last month, FBI Director Robert Mueller was careful to note that the first two parts of Trilogy have been completed: no less than 30,000 computers, 4,000 printers, 1,600 scanners, 465 servers, and 1,400 routers were deployed as of April 2004.

After more than four years of hard work and half a billion dollars spent, however, Trilogy has had little impact on the FBI's antiquated case-management system, which today remains a morass of mainframe green screens and vast stores of paper records. As Senator Judd Gregg observed, "the software, which runs the hardware, is a huge problem."
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http://www.infoworld.com/infoworld/article/05/03/21/12FEfbi_1.html

The government has never demonstrated the slightest clue as to
how to do software development. They tend to approach it the same
way one develops a tank or a dam project, and are always a bit
surprised when (once again) the product turns out to be useless.

But I didn't post it in LBN.

Anywhere you want to.

Every large project I've witnessed that was designed by a committee has been a total screw-up. Committees naturally bloat design requirements, and can't stay focused on the main problem that needs solving. They also become highly politicized, which creates some of the most mind boggling "compromises" you can imagine, (or can't imagine.)

rather than the technology is the problem. You can have perfectly functional intelligence systems built using old 3270 screens if you design it properly. Similarly, you can have an appalling application running on the latest IT architecture if you get it wrong. Just installing the latest software is rarely a solution on its own.

... extant in the federal government today. The all-consuming paradigm in every federal bureaucracy is cost-accounting and work-breakdown. This is an analytical-without-synthetic approach. The organization provides no womb for integration of the discrete tasks of building the baby's arm, building the baby's leg, building the baby's ass, etc. The organization itself is deliberately compartmentalized into cost-accounting foxholes, where the all-consuming motivation is to increase the firepower (budget and authority) while reducing the area of accountability (mission). They attempt to graft an isolated and fragmented 'project' onto such an organization and focus solely on segregation and isolation of the work - without a baseline organizational design that inherently integrates and synthesizes development. In essence, they couldn't make it more impossible if they tried.

It'd be like building an automobile without an assembly line - contracting separate conceptual (but not centrally-designed) parts on an FOB basis. The absence of an overriding assembly-line organization inherently abdicates any responsibility to integrate those parts into either the organization or its product.

causes you to use the DWAG development methodology.

Design As We Go, or DAWG, has never saved an out of control project.