The Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental broke new ground for Defense acquisition by setting up a process that gets vendors on contract in as little as 60 days. Now the Army thinks it can move twice as quickly with a new rapid prototyping process designed specifically for cyber defense.
The service’s program executive office for enterprise information systems (PEO-EIS) is in the process of putting together a vendor consortium that will make use of DoD’s other transaction (OT) authorities, a trend which has grown over the past year as Congress and the Pentagon have granted Defense components greater leeway to enter into agreements that sidestep the Federal Acquisition Regulation.
First, the Army needs to hire an independent firm or group to manage the consortium, and is meeting with candidates this month. The winner, expected to be selected in May, will be in charge of recruiting companies into the consortium to make sure the Army has a healthy base of cyber defense vendors to choose from, recommending new technologies for the government to prototype, managing security approvals for newly-selected technologies through the Risk Management Framework, enforcing the Army’s open architecture standards, and general administration of the consortium.
Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsradio.com/army/2017/12/army-charts-30-day-acquisition-process-for-new-cyber-capabilities/
