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Getting IT Is Getting Faster All The Time
At the heart of Defense buying is an emphasis on speed as budgets demand increased efficiencies at reduced costs.
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To be sure, there are a lot of IT contracts out there for Defense and Military buyers to use including those from GSA. The Army, Navy, Air Force and DISA all sponsor contracts. Cureen and future contracts all have one thing in common; they are being designed to speed up the delivery of products and services to customers – especially those Warfighters on the edge.
DISA is pushing envelope on how they view contracting and compelling the uniform services to understand a new mentality according to Jeremy Potter, DOD Analyst for INPUT Research.
“For example, when you talk to DISA CIO John Garing about taking technology to the edge, they are really turning to a much quicker turnaround in their contracting,” Potter told 1105 Custom Media. “They are looking to reuse
contract vehicles rather than build a whole new contract; using task orders and any possible tool at their disposal to turn around procurements more quickly and get technology out to the Warfighter more quickly.”
 The result are capabilities such as DISA’s recently introduced RACE capability where they are offering short term “pay as you go” developer services – ones they can provision within 24 hours and use just for a month if that’s all they need. This is dramatically different to a long term contract with all the upfront infrastructure costs that could take up to 18 months to get going and customers are obligated to pay even after their testing is finished.
DISA’s Tony Purvis says it’s all about getting things procured faster, delivered to the force faster, delivered to the customer faster. “All of our contracts we are awarding now are these services-based contracts where we really not buying things or owning things. These are like an IDIQ or BPA type action where we are getting CLIN structures established so we can place orders against them and get deliveries going faster”
Potter describes it this way. “DISA is taking from both ends. It’s taking from industry to say this is something that industry found is using (e.g. Cloud computing); it fits in to our mission and we can integrate it and then push it out to warfighter proactively. At the same time the Warfighter is turning around and saying we need it faster and better, so then DISA has to turn that around more quickly.”
So instead of building the big contracts of 10 years ago, DISA is looking to the quickest solution to get this out. “Cloud computing was brought to them by industry and they said ‘how quickly can we get this out’,” said Potter.
“They didn’t put together a big contract vehicle that would take 2-3 years. There were no billion dollar massive industry contracts; they said ‘how can we take this and turn around very quickly and make this available to Computing Services tomorrow’”
Potter thinks this mentality is going to seep throughout all of DOD as DISA becomes more entrenched as the services provider to all of the uniform services. They see soldiers and civilians using Google and Amazon in their personal lives and they are meeting with them on the professional level and hearing from them what are the cutting edge technologies on the commercial level.
“They are trying to incorporate this mentality into their business model; that’s why you have seen AKO/DKO (Defense Knowledge Online) switchover,” Potter said. “DISA’s quicker shorter turnaround mentality has become the new model or new thing to do and that is spreading throughout the services.”
A Prime Example
Much of this new thinking is because budgets and spending are trending towards saving money and being more efficient. These are the contractual results of tightening the budget and looking for areas to be more efficient and dynamic and how military can do that. And DISA is out front on that.
A good example how Air Force has picked up what DISA is doing is its upcoming NETCENTS 2 procurement according to Potter. NETCENTS 1 was traditional primes competing on Task Orders every day.
On NETCENTS-2 you are going to see a transition to a specialized contract vehicle where different core service (e.g. Program Management, Engineering, IT Services etc.) capabilities will be competed separately from each other to create smaller groups of contractors.
Rather than developing separate contracts for each requirement, Defense agencies are packaging product and services requirements into contracts with multiple
subcategories with multiple awardees. The result is a contract that can run from 5-7 years where competition is on the Task Order level.
According to the Air Force the NETCENTS-2 acquisition strategy calls for eight separate procurements – two products-related contract vehicles and six services vehicles – each with multiple contract awards. Of these, four contracts will be set aside for small businesses, one for products and three for services. The bottom line is the number of prime contract awardees will jump from 8 winners on the current contract to between 51 and 80 according to the Air Force.
This model is being played out in other upcoming contracts including the NGEN recomplete of NMCI, Navy’s CANES (Consolidated Afloat Enterprise Services) and Army’s new CTS (Communication and Transmission Systems) contract.
Lots of Choices
In terms of picking and choosing contract vehicles there are lots of options. Just look at how many different contracts you can use (e.g. ITES and ADMC) looking at Enterprise Software Initiative (ESI), which is what CHESS is built on said Potter.
Further because the types of services needed are similar, you can usually fit your requirement within another contract vehicle. For example ITES, NETCENTS and Encore all provide similar service offerings and are very flexible as to what can be included on the contract. Being “in scope” is usually not an issue.
But the reality is most buyers use the contract from their own agency. So, for NETCENTS is 80 percent Air Force. Encore is 80 percent DISA. ITES is 80 percent Army. But that doesn’t mean you can’t go outside; and you can use GSA as well said Potter.
For the buyer it can come down to resources. Are there enough Contracting Officers do get what I need or should I outsource the procurement to DISA. Human capital is definitely an issue, but finding a vehicle to get what you need should not be.
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