CSC finishes its Trilogy part

Officials at Computer Sciences Corp. have delivered the final piece of the information presentation component of the FBI's Trilogy modernization program, the company announced today.

Finishing a couple of days ahead of schedule, CSC officials completed the second phase of a three-phase program designed to help field agents use investigative tools and better share information. The second phase — full system capability — completes CSC's work on the project.

"This was a true partnership," said Hank Dinunzio, CSC's Trilogy program manager, about the project. "I think there was a common understanding of what we were trying to accomplish, and I think it was very powerful. I think this is a major improvement in the infrastructure at the FBI."

CSC officials finished Trilogy's first phase, the transportation network, in March 2003. That included a wide-area network architecture for secure communications between FBI offices.

The final phase, the user application component developed by Science Applications International Corp. is slated to finish in a couple of months, FBI officials have said, and will include the Virtual Case File application for compiling and sharing case information.

Trilogy has seen several deadline shifts, and CSC most recently missed the December 2003 deadline for this implementation. FBI officials recently revised the contract with CSC to include penalties if the vendor did not meet the April 30 deadline.

For the next two months, CSC officials will provide post-deployment support to FBI officials and will have a response team on hand to travel to any field office location to fix any problems, Dinunzio said. Officials are disassembling one of the two facilities which were constructed to simulate field offices and headquarters to test the applications before they are launched. The facility, in Chantilly, Va., will be packaged and sent to FBI officials so they can continue to test any changes and upgrades to the project.

This completed full system capability phase includes new file, print, e-mail and storage servers for more than 600 FBI locations, and more than 29,000 users were migrated to the new e-mail server, CSC officials said. CSC also implemented a new enterprise management system for infrastructure management and software distribution.

Dinunzio said CSC had more than 350 people working on the highly visible project. "We're very happy," he said.