Fergie's Tech Blog

Senators seek to fast track FBI's Sentinel

Michael Arnone writes in FCW.com:

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee asked FBI Director Robert Mueller today why it will take nearly four years for the bureau to get its new comprehensive data-management system up and running.

The FBI was scheduled to issue a contract for the Sentinel program by the end of this year and complete the four-phase implementation in 40 months, Mueller said.

But lawmakers suggested that was too far on the horizon. Having the system operational by 2009 is “an awful long ways away,” said Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), the committee’s chairman. He asked Mueller whether it was realistic to set up a counterterrorism infrastructure if the information technology to support the system was not in place.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) asked Mueller if the country could afford to wait that long and if Congress could do anything to speed the process.

But Mueller said that implementing Sentinel will simply take time because the FBI has to triage more than 100 existing systems and then create new ones for Sentinel. The bureau must also learn to handle large projects the way a large corporation would, he said.

posted by Fergie @ 7/27/2005 01:39:00 PM