Today’s Washington Post has another article on the failed FBI software project to automate case files. It’s based on a report by the Survey and Investigations Staff of the House Appropriations Committee. The highlights of that report are the failure of the FBI to notify SAIC, the contractor, of problems they had found and the FBI’s spending $17,000,000 testing a system they knew would be scrapped.
There are many reasons why this project failed, but I think two are central. According to an audit by the NRC the application development process did not include any users. How in the Lord’s name you can build something without getting input from the people it is to be used by boggles the mind?
The other is a failure to ask the obvious questions as described by Michael Schrage of MIT in this article. Quoting Schrage,“For example, the FBI never addressed how its agents currently used technology to manage their cases, and how the new software would modify and improve that process.” The frequent changing of specifications is one indication that there was no basic description of the problem and how it was to be resolved. The groundwork for this is usually an overall enterprise architecture, which, as the NRC found, did not exist at the FBI.
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