Via Reason Magazine comes a link to an audit 
of the FBI’s lingering problems in upgrading its computer systems. The report betrays an agency that is plumbing new depths of government incompetence.
The short version is the FBI doesn’t know what it currently has and so doesn’t know what it wants. It relies on five separate invesigative computer systems, but has so little documentation about how those systems work that it is engaged in an expensive reverse engineering of its own software systems.
Communications problems between FBI headquarters, field offices and contractors have left agents without computers for weeks at a time.
To add insult to injury, the FBI has decided to jettison WordPerfect in favor of MS Word organization-wide. But numerous field offices complained that FBI Headquarters continues to drag its feet on converting the 1,000 or so FBI-specific WordPerfect macros to MS Word equivalents.
Source:
FBI under fire for IT slipups. Evan Hansen, CNet.Com, December 20, 2002.