Contracting a Net-Centric Future
Written by Harrison Donnelly
MIT 2011 Volume: 15 Issue: 6 (July)
Key Air Force organizations will be able to get help in thinking and planning strategically for their net-centric future under a new contract vehicle being developed by the service’s IT acquisition office.
The new Enterprise Integration and Service Management (EISM) program, which has a five-year ceiling of $460 million, covers a wide range of services for Air Force major commands, direct reporting units and center-level organizations that want to develop and manage service-based IT capabilities and effectively integrate them with existing systems. It represents the first of seven indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contracts to be created under the NETCENTS-2, the Air Force’s revamped IT acquisition program.
The contractors selected late last year for EISM—Booz Allen Hamilton, CACI Enterprise Solutions, Deloitte Consulting, Dynamics Research Corp. (DRC), SAIC and Jacobs Technology (formerly Tech- Team Government Solutions)—have spent the past months developing and refining their teams of partner companies and preparing to bid on task orders, while Air Force officials have been busy establishing processes and procedures for the program. Several Air Force organizations have already expressed an interest in participating, according to officials, and the first task orders are expected in the coming months. The services to be available through EISM include “maintaining information about legacy systems in enterprise architectures, recommending emerging technologies and solutions, conducting analyses to support portfolio management, conducting engineering analyses with an eye toward domain impacts, defining target architectures, and developing tools and methodologies to support enterprise integration activities,” according to NETCENTS-2 spokesperson Stephen Davis.
The types of issues these services will address could include “assistance in implementation of the services development and delivery process, recommendations on how to implement engineering baseline discipline, performing enterprisewide systems engineering advice/recommendations, support for the AF Enterprise Dashboard, and assistance with the way ahead for SharePoint 2010,” Davis continued.
Design Umbrella
Dan Marion, who has been working with the program as a technology director for Deloitte Consulting in the Air Force Market, offered this observation on the program’s approach: “The idea is to get all of their design, develop, legacy sustainment, network and infrastructure solutions under one umbrella, so they can control how they’re spending their IT and move to a much more efficient technology baseline.
“The Air Force wants to spend more time upfront identifying mission needs and validating a broad spectrum of requirements, and then architecting solutions to take advantage of things that have been previously developed and paid for, so that long-term they’re much more cost and mission-effective,” Marion continued. “In the past, anyone with money would go develop their own stack, but they want to get away from developing each solution as its own stack and move to a different approach where you just develop the piece of the application that enables the business process that you need, while leveraging enterprise infrastructure, platforms, software and data, whether provided by the Defense Information Systems Agency or the Air Force. Their real goal is to move to a service-oriented future state rather than an application stack-oriented state.”
Irving Zaks, senior vice president and general manager, Defense Group, for DRC, emphasized the program’s mission of helping to bring technology that has already been proven in the commercial market to the Air Force.
“As they created EISM, the government people recognized that they needed innovation and decided to look for teams that could take the new technologies that are available in the marketplace and bring them to the government,” Zaks said. “Recognizing that budgets would be reduced, and recalling the risks associated with the larger programs that have been attempted, and in many cases fallen short of expectations, they were looking for some new blood, but with minimal risk.”
Zaks summed up his company’s approach this way: “We looked at the commercial sector and decided that there was an opportunity to bring the competitive energy and thought leadership there to the military. The idea is to take the legacy systems out there that have a place and are familiar to the warfighter, and modernize them and combine them with some of the newer information systems to bring net-centricity to the marketplace. We’ve looked for the elements that were well enough along to technology to not add risk because they’ve been proven in the commercial space.”
As an example of the kind of project that might be managed under EISM, Zaks cited the case of major commands with extensive deployed operations, but that are still doing their information operations back at headquarters, using expensive and inefficient communications links. Instead, an EISM contract might help design a system in which more of the information processing was carried out in theater. That system then could be acquired and built using other types of NETCENTS contracts.
All task orders for EISM will be centrally issued by the administrative contracting officer at Maxwell AFB-Gunter Annex, Ala. Unlike other parts of NETCENTS, non-Air Force units are not allowed to place orders under EISM. “EISM is viewed as an initiative the AF will use to manage its own IT initiatives and its tasks will be centrally awarded by the contracting team at Gunter, which is not resourced to do non-Air Force work,” Davis explained.
A key provision of NETCENTS-2 services contracts, including EISM, is that it requires that 23 percent of subcontracting work go to small businesses across specific socio-economic categories, rather than just setting a percentage goal for general small business participation. As a result, prime contractors have devoted substantial effort to recruiting smaller firms located near Air Force bases around the country, which can offer unique understanding and relationships well-suited to providing the type of long-range analysis offered through EISM.
“In general, the small businesses across the AF don’t stay in business unless they have a real capability and resource niche,” Marion said. “If you’re looking to help a functional client think about their future state, and how to get the most bang for the buck, you’ll often find a small business in that environment that may know the client.
“We really see that. Everywhere the Air Force is, there are small businesses that serve them, and they have deep roots,” he said, adding, “That, plus Deloitte’s breadth of capabilities and thought leadership is a great combination.”
NETCENT S-2 Rollout
The rollout of EISM comes as the Air Force also implements a somewhat delayed process of transferring from the existing NETCENTS program to NETCENTS-2. NETCENTS, which was established in 2004 as a five-year program, currently remains available for new orders under September 9, 2012, with performance to continue until September 8, 2014.
Following are six remaining NETCENTS-2 components, together with their projected award dates:
- Net-centric products, which includes networking equipment, servers/storage, peripherals, multimedia, software, identity management/biometric hardware and associated software, delivery, warranty and maintenance; fall of 2011.
- Two network operations and infrastructure solutions contracts, which include network management and defense, serviceoriented architecture infrastructure, enterprise level security and management, and implementation and operations; full and open competition, winter of 2012; small business competition, summer of 2012.
- Two application services contracts, which include systems sustainment and development, migration, integration and net-centric data services; small business competition, spring of 2012; full and open competition, late summer of 2012.
- IT professional support and engineering services (ITPS), which includes IT program management support and engineering services; fall of 2012. Like EISM, the ITPS program falls into the advisory and assistance category. But while the focus of EISM is at the strategic level to assist with requirements within an enterprise or domain, ITPS provides support at the tactical level. The seven NETCENTS-2 IDIQ contracts have a combined ceiling of $24.2 billion. ♦
