FBI Case Management System. Another case of failed IT projects?
FBI Case Management System, another case of failed IT projects
by: Ephraim Gadsby – contributing author
The FBI recently announced the cancellation of a major IT project where nearly $170 Million dollars and 3 years were spent to end up with a system that only does 10% of what was envisioned.
It is rare when failed IT projects hit the main stream news media, especially in this industry. Recently, there was a flurry of activity and news reports surrounding the new system being developed for the FBI by the well known government contractor, SAIC. The system was called Trilogy and was to be a state of the art Case Management system for the FBI that would centralize all case intelligence.
First, there are 2 reasons why this made national news…
- The size of the failure: $170 Million Dollars
- The system was commissioned directly because of the information sharing deficiencies brought to light by the September 11 attack.
The general public (tax payers) can relate to both of these issues.
It is rare for IT projects to be as large as this one but unfortunately, failure is not rare. I have provided links below to the original press release from SAIC announcing the award of the Trilogy contract from the FBI.
These links provide main stream media news about the failure
This news is important to the LIMSfinder readers because our readers are regularly implementing IT projects for the laboratory and are having varying degrees of success.
I would like to invite the readers to post comments to this article to discuss their own advice on how to make an IT project a success rather than a failure. You should try to stay positive and provide advice for our readers that helps them be successful. Everyone can provide examples of failures. It is better to learn from mistakes and devise an approach for project success from the education of failure.
Let us hear your advice.
Thanks,
Ephraim Gadsby, Bertie’s alter ego
