Transcript
Zal Azmi, chief information officer of the FBI, was appointed
to his post in 2004.
Azmi: While I was talking to the Director when he was offering
me the job we talked about what our priorities would be, and
two things actually stood up:
Provide an automated case management system for FBI, and later
on we actually called it information management system, because
the mission of the FBI was not about information and not purely
cases, because we did have domestic intelligence as one of our
line of business.
And [the] number-two priority was actually building an information
technology organization that will sustain the changes that will
come and the mission of the organization, but also the technologies
that we will be bringing and deploying.
On Sentinal, the FBI’s information technology program:
Azmi: I think we have come a long way. Sentinel was a project
that we estimated would be completed by 2010, and we’re well
on our way.
Sentinel is a program that is watched by everyone, internally
and externally. I can tell you we are doing very well because the
latest GAO audit report that came out, they made recommendations,
but all those recommendations were more generic to the FBI IT environment
than Sentinel itself, so that tells me that after two years into
this program we have made a lot of progress.
In terms of other capabilities, while Sentinel is moving forward—it’s
fully funded, we’re fully engaged, we’re making progress—we
are delivering capabilities almost every other month.
We have builds and capabilities that are coming out because we
decided to be more agile in our development and delivery capabilities
because users will not wait 12 or 18 months for new capabilities,
so we changed our development methodology and now we’re delivering
capabilities to the users almost every other month.
On other IT
programs:
Azmi: Aside from Sentinel—like I said, Sentinel is only
one program—there are other improvements we’ve made
to the Bureau. I will tell you that the majority of our focus has
been to enable our agents to communicate anywhere anytime, because
most of our agents will not sit in the office behind their desks.
They will be outside working in the field.
For example, our Blackberry deployment; we have deployed 20,500
Blackberrys thus far. Our goal was that every one of our agents
and every one of our intelligence analysts will have a Blackberry
so that they’re always reachable and they’re always
in communication. Not only for their calendar and e-mail and Google
maps and stuff like that, but also we deployed applications on
these Blackberrys so they can do some generic work.
For example, they can search DMV files, they have access to NCIC
files. Those are the kind of capabilities that we’re pushing
to the Blackberry’s to keep the agents where they are, if
it’s a stake-out or they’re outside of the office,
they can actually do searches instead of coming to the office.
Priorities moving forward:
Azmi: I would say that our priorities for the future remain in
four areas. We must concentrate on our information sharing and
collaboration capabilities.
We have a lot of data and a lot of information in [the] FBI that
we can share with our law enforcement and intelligence partners,
but also they have a lot of information that we need to facilitate
their sharing with the FBI agents and analysts.
We need to concentrate on our knowledge management. We still have
a lot of paper files. We need to find a way to automate, digitize
and bring all of that information to what I call the information
grid so they’re easily searchable and retrievable by the
users.
We also need to concentrate on our analytical capabilities. With
petabytes of data that is available to the users, we need to give
them the means to quickly sift through the information and find
the nuggets they are looking for. So they can search. They can
link it. They can analyze it. They can visualize it. They can map
it or put it on a map using geospatial capabilities. That is the
platform we really need to develop and move forward.”
FBI
capabilities:
Azmi: The Bureau has not been given a lot of credit for their
information technology capabilities. If you compare the FBI with
its partners in the law enforcement or the intelligence community,
or even international partners, you will see that we have achieved
a lot.
As a matter of fact, a lot of technologies that we have in the
Bureau, a lot of capabilities that we have in the Bureau, a lot
of processes that we have built in the Bureau are being used as
best practices in other agencies.
From my organization alone I probably have over 20 people that
are working in different intelligence community organizations,
sitting on their boards, and actually assisting the community to
move forward. And that has been not recognized. And it’s
mainly, I would say, because the Bureau has always … is trying
to do its best getting the job done. We have had very little time
actually to go out there and sort of brag about all of the capabilities
we have.”
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