FBI begins knowledge management facelift

Computerworld - WASHINGTON -- The FBI this week began focusing its attention -- as well as tens of millions of dollars from its fiscal 2004 budget request -- on improving its data warehousing and mining capabilities.
The bureau announced that it awarded a contract to New York-based ClearForest Corp. to deploy business-intelligence software to support a new FBI data warehouse that consists of a Terrorism Intelligence Database and an Information Sharing Data Mart. FBI agents are now being trained on ClearForest's software, which will enable them to analyze multiple document repositories that house more than 1 billion documents.
Barak Pridor, CEO of ClearForest, said the same technology has been used for years at large Global 2,000 firms such as The Dow Chemical Co., Thomson Financial and Ford Motor Co.
The FBI's focus on data mining follows the completion last month of the initial rollout of an enterprisewide network known as Trilogy. The $400 million infrastructure program has so far included the deployment of 21,000 desktops, more than 3,000 printers and nearly 1,500 scanners, and links 622 FBI offices via high-speed data connections. In addition, Trilogy will form the transport layer for the FBI's new Virtual Case File and an integrated data warehouse that will eventually link 31 FBI databases through a single Web portal, said FBI Director Robert Mueller, who spoke April 10 at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing.
The Virtual Case File database is slated to be fully deployed by year's end.
"We are now focused on implementing a data warehousing capability that can bring together our information into databases that can be accessed by agents throughout the world as well as our analysts as soon as a piece of information is developed," Mueller said.
Getting to this point hasn't been easy, he said. In addition to having to find $138 million for the first phase of Trilogy in an existing budget that didn't cover it, the bureau had to rewrite the original deployment plan, which Mueller said had provided little long-term vision for technology refreshment.
The original plan called for the addition of a new graphical user interface, without providing for upgrades to the FBI's central databases, said Mueller. Simply "putting lipstick on a pig ... would not enable us to use the analytical tools we needed," he said.
In the aftermath of a recent report by the U.S. Department of Justice's inspector general that criticized the FBI for spending "hundreds of millions of dollars" on failed IT projects, Mueller said he's tightening his grip on the bureau's IT purchasing.