FBI's Trilogy rollout delayed after CSC misses deadline
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The FBI has delayed final deployment of Trilogy, its enterprise investigative system, because Computer Sciences Corp. missed a delivery deadline for a component of the third and last phase of the project.
The FBI has delayed final deployment of Trilogy, its enterprise investigative system, because Computer Sciences Corp. missed a delivery deadline for a component of the third and last phase of the project.
The General Services Administration, the contracting agency for the project, announced the delay last week. CSC's failure to meet its delivery date for the Phase 3 information presentation application will prevent the FBI from deploying the third component, the Virtual Case File, by Dec. 13 as planned, GSA's Federal Systems Integration Management Center said in a statement.
The agency is assessing what effect the delay will have on program costs and deployment schedules, GSA spokeswoman Mary Alice Johnson said.
Despite the delay, the bureau will continue to train all 28,000 FBI employees to use Trilogy. During the first and second phases, which wrapped up this spring, the bureau fielded 21,000 desktop PCs; 622 LANs; 2,612 switches and routers; 291 servers; and a WAN to serve users at 595 sites.
CSC notified the FBI and GSA this summer that the project was facing some schedule slippage, Johnson said.
New baseline
'CSC and the FBI are taking positive steps to address the causes of program delays, and meetings are ongoing to schedule a new baseline for the program,' CSC said in a separate statement. The company added, 'The FBI and CSC have stated that delays to date will not impact the FBI's ability to search for data using the current analytical tools in place.'
The Justice Department's inspector general has consistently criticized the FBI's IT management. Justice reported in September that the bureau repeatedly has failed to implement IT reform recommendations that it had received from the General Accounting Office and the department's IG.
The FBI originally planned to spend $379 million on Trilogy but received an additional $78 million to complete the project. The total cost of the project jumped again this summer, when bureau officials said Trilogy's price tag would be $596 million. The agency's CIO, Wilson Lowery, has attributed the cost increases to changes and additions to the Trilogy program.
Missed deadlines
The bureau originally planned to complete Trilogy by December 2002.
'CSC has missed a number of deadlines over a period of time. The announcement was just a recognition that the deadline was unachievable,' an FBI systems specialist said. The bureau and its contractors have had substantial delays in rolling out Trilogy's enterprise e-mail, the systems specialist said. 'They have security problems with it,' he said.
A House legislative aide agreed that the e-mail overhaul portion of Trilogy had gone badly.
'The e-mail project has big problems, covering connectivity, the migration from the old e-mail system, planning and execution of the plan,' the aide said. 'They said they would get this problem under control in 2002.'
Bureau officials declined to comment on the Trilogy delay.
CSC became the lead Trilogy contractor after it acquired DynCorp Inc. in December 2002. DynCorp of Reston, Va., received the initial three-year, $132 million task order for the project in May 2001.
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