e.magination provides solutions for federal, state, and local government organizations and agencies that enable them to better serve their constituents and more effectively execute their mission.
Real-time Analytical Intelligence Database (RAID)
Background
The National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC), established in 1993, is a component of the U.S. Department of Justice and a member of the U.S. intelligence community. NDIC is designated by the General Counterdrug Intelligence Plan, signed by President Clinton in February 2000, as the national center for strategic domestic counterdrug intelligence. Part of NDIC’s mission is to perform document exploitation. This function employs teams of intelligence analysts that deploy to sites where volumes of information were seized in major federal drug investigations. Using a computer database developed in-house at NDIC known as Real-time Analytical Intelligence Database (RAID), the teams collect, collate and label large volumes of information from seized documents and computers. The teams then subject this material to detailed analysis to identify hidden assets, previously unknown associates and other leads for further investigation.
Business Problem
The Microsoft Access-based implementation of RAID presently used by NDIC operates well in small environments, but does not perform efficiently in their larger scale environments involving simultaneous access by more than 15-20 analysts.
In 2002 NDIC initiated a contract to develop a scalable, user-friendly and upgradeable version of RAID. The results of the contract over a 13 month period did not meet the customer’s needs and expectations. Therefore, the contract was terminated by NDIC.
Business Solution
NDIC re-competed the RAID development contract in 2004. e.magination was awarded the re-competed contract and started work on the RAID re-development in February 2005.
e.magination worked with NDIC to refine the contract requirements, develop a system architecture, and presented a program plan to the government in March 2005. The plan proposed developing RAID in stages, with stage 1 providing approximately 50% of the required capability in 6 months, and stage 2 providing the remainder of the functionality in another 3 months. An additional period of 3 months was designated for testing and user training.
The RAID application is re-architected as a client/server application, using Microsoft SQL Server and a custom developed Microsoft Visual Basic .NET client application. The SQL Server database contains 112 custom-defined tables. The client application accesses the database using over 500 custom-developed stored procedures. The client application is multi-tiered, comprising Presentation, Business and Data Access and over 600 custom classes comprising a quarter of a million lines of developed code. Besides the specific capabilities developed for the RAID application, the application implements general schemes for advanced query using a query builder tool, find and replace, data import and export, multimedia support and report generation.
e.magination delivered the final RAID product in March 2006. The NDIC customer is highly satisfied with imagination's performance, rating e.magination excellent in quality and outstanding in business relations and cost control.
Results and Benefits
e.magination delivered a product with more functionality than the previous effort in much less time and for less cost while keeping the customer directly in the loop with frequent technical visits, weekly and monthly status meetings, and a SharePoint collaboration portal. The new RAID application meets NDIC’s goals of scalability, usability and expandability thus enabling NDIC to support larger documentation exploitation missions. In addition, the new features of the software enable analysts to perform missions more effectively and efficiently.