FBI’s Information Systems, Intellectually Immoral
I heard about the problems faced by the FBI regarding the development of their Virtual Case File (VCF) while I was working for Documentum/EMC. The case is only unique in that hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted rather than hundreds of thousands by private firms. We saw this type of failure frequently in all sorts of sectors, not just the government, but we never saw anything that was quite this massive.
There’s a certain baseless reluctance by governments and large firms that sometimes only small businesses seem to understand. “Commerical software can’t possibly do what WE need it to do.” That’s the assumption that plagues some govt organizations (and sometimes big businesses) that think their problem of dealing with data is unique. Sure, the business problem at hand is inherently different, but the technology and methods on the back end are mostly identical. But it doesn’t help when you have a government contractor steering or allowing you to steer in the wrong direction when they should be calling the turns. After all, that’s why consultants exist, right?
The most amusing example of this problem was when a hospital, for instance, would try to write their own custom applications because somehow they care for patients differently than the rest of the world and their applications should reflect it. Or a bank that tries to write it’s own system to manage checks from the ground up. Um, hello! (Pssst: the rest of the world writes checks too.)
It’s like the government saying that they needed to buy dump trucks to clean up after 9/11, but the commercially available ones were not sufficient somehow. So they contract with a firm to build dump trucks completely from scratch. Doesn’t make much sense, does it?
The FBI’s failed system is a classic case of trying to reinvent the wheel rather than just acquiring off-the-shelf applications and customizing it to spec. There’s not a developer of software that doesn’t have an API that allows for customization or integration with other apps. It’s common practice.
SAIC can’t take all of the blame, but they certainly knew that using commercial software and customizing it would have meant a smaller deal size with the government. Why save the government hundreds of millions of dollars and enormous risk, not just risk associated with project failure but risk related to national security, with time tested commercial software when they can get paid to reinvent the wheel? They put their own greed over national security. Responsible parties at the executive level should have stepped in and put the kibosh on the deal. What transpired was intellectually immoral.