CSC misses deadline, FBI Trilogy rollout delayed

The FBI must delay taking Trilogy, its enterprisewide investigative system, fully live because Computer Sciences Corp. has missed a delivery deadline for a component of the third and final phase.

GSA's Federal Systems Integration Management Center, which is the contracting agency for the project, announced the delay late yesterday. CSC's failure to meet its delivery date for the Phase 3 information presentation component will prevent the FBI from deploying the third component, the Virtual Case File, by Dec. 13 as planned, GSA said in a statement.

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 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 noted 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 had repeatedly failed to implement IT reform recommendations that it had received from the General Accounting Office and the department's IG. (Click to link to the report)

The FBI originally planned to spend $379 million on Trilogy but has since received an additional $78 million to complete the project.

"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 enterprisewide e-mail, the systems specialist said. "They have security problems with it."

Wilson P. Dizard III writes for Government Computer News magazine.