(2 of 5)
Today, however, companies that excel in connecting the data dots are finding a lifeline in a customer whose IT ineptitude is matched only by its means: the U.S. government, which will spend $53 billion on information technology this year. The Federal Government's inability to share and analyze information became clear in the months after the 9/11 attacks. An FBI agent in Phoenix, Ariz., who was suspicious of Arab flight-school students was not aware that he had a colleague in Minneapolis, Minn., with the same concerns. Immigration officials didn't know that a Saudi suspected by the CIA of terrorist ties had applied for a visa. "If you look at the lessons learned from Sept. 11," says Ed Sketch, director of Ford's Learning Network, which uses Autonomy software to categorize and distribute information to all its salaried employees, "this technology is slap-bang in the middle because it sorts the relevant from the irrelevant to keep an organization from drowning in data."
It didn't take long for data-management companies to realize that if their software could find links in customer buying patterns and improve retailers' inventory decisions, perhaps it could find links among the government's vast terrorism-related intelligence warehouses and enhance the government's ability to prevent the next attack. After 9/11, many tech companies saw opportunities for both patriotism and profit. Oracle offered to donate the software to create a federal identity database. Siebel Systems CEO Thomas Siebel boasted to a House subcommittee that had his company's software been used by law-enforcement and intelligence organizations before 9/11, "there may have been a different outcome."
Promises of quick fixes have faded as the scale of the government's challenge has become clear. But the early setbacks have not deterred companies from setting up shop in or near Washington to get closer to the action. In the past year, Raytheon and EMC launched a joint government IT unit, and SAP relocated its global public-sector headquarters to the Washington area. And PeopleSoft launched two new products designed for the Homeland Security market.
The biggest winner so far appears to be Autonomy, which recently won a contract initially worth about $3 million to provide the software for information collection, analysis and routing for the 22 agencies that fall under the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS). But few other contracts have been signed thus far, as the feds slog through the swampy process of budgeting, appropriating and procuring. "We've all been waiting for the wheelbarrows of money to show up," says Leonard Pomata, president of the government division of webMethods, based in Fairfax, Va. "Aside from the emergency funding that has been spent on guards and gates and guns...there hasn't been a significant amount for new initiatives."
That should change in the coming months, once DHS Secretary Tom Ridge has time to survey his new dominion. As details of the government's actions before 9/11 continue to unfold, two immediate needs become clear. The U.S. needs better ways of uncovering hidden connections within the masses of information it collects from different sources. And it needs to make sure that information stored within one agency's database can be shared with the appropriate officials elsewhere.