A Q&A with the FBI's data czar
Q: Okay. So you come back from this meeting and you're surprised, right? They're saying you're going to pull it off and you have grave questions?
A: Right.
Q: So, you came back and what did you tell the director?
A: I told the director, I said, if they pull it off with a big "IF" if they pull it off, he's going to have one of the best case management systems that the organization has seen. And he goes–he asked me, he says, "Why are you saying "IF"? I said, because I'm not sure that the demo I saw has the system capabilities and that was true, I did not see the actual data behind the system. And then he asked me the question, he goes, "What do you think of this Flash Cut Over, why can't we–this is a big risk, how can we get rid of it?"
And the idea behind that was we got to bring a legacy system down [Automated Case Support] and we're going to bring VCF system on line. And the question that we had in the discussion was, well, so you're bringing down that old legacy system, you're bringing VCF up and they said, yes . . . So, I said, well if it crashes what happens to the data. They said, "Well, we're going to have to wait them, bring it back on line." That was the major concern the director had and we both shared that concern that, you know, here we're moving from a legacy system. So, okay, it gets old but it's working, it's stable.
So, he said, why don't you take a look at it and then from that point we met with the National Research Council and that was one of their recommendations that we should reconsider our decision. But by then we already knew that, what SAIC delivered and on December 17, was not the product we were looking for.
Q: So, at that meeting with the director did you say to him, "I don't think this is going to work?"
A: I told them, if they pull it off–
Q: But you never said to him –
A: That it's not going to work? No. Because this program is too huge to make that kind of judgment call at one setting. I mean, I don't know if the reasons why I recommended to the director that we would have to have an independent evaluation was because of the complexity of the program. I mean, I can sit down and look at, in terms of architecture, I can look at it in terms of requirements or I can sit down and look at it in terms of security, but to do that from end-to-end you really need an independent team to do it.
Q: But instinctively, did you know it was a dud? Just from your years of having done this?
A: Not really. My concern was in, like I said, first of all we didn't have the legacy data. I mean, the interface was there . . . the work flow, everything worked.
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