GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service said in a FedBizOpps notice posted last Wednesday that IBM will help manage the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) and the System for Award Management (SAM) as well as migrate data and functionality to an updated version of the SAM system.
The conflict of interest investigation comes approximately one month before the Pentagon was set to award the $10 billion contract—to host, analyze and process swaths of classified and sensitive military data—to one of four competing companies: AWS, Microsoft, IBM or Oracle.
In a partially redacted court filing released Friday in Oracle’s suit against the Defense Department, government lawyers explained their motion to stay—or delay—the case stemmed from “new information” regarding “possible conflicts of interest involving former DoD employee, Deap Ubhi.”
Ubhi worked in the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service for almost two years in between jobs at Amazon Web Services.
Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2019/02/pentagon-investigating-whether-amazon-employee-tilted-jedi-contract/155118/
The extension was announced in a contracting document dated Aug. 13 that cited an urgent need to keep IBM on the job while the agency explores the possibility of a competitive offering.
IBM has held the System for Award Management Architecture and Operations Contract Services contract for eight years, and it is leading the effort to modernize the system of systems that government agencies and vendors use to manage hundreds of billions in government contracts annually.
IBM’s contract expired Aug. 14. GSA had intended to award IBM another long-term deal, but according to contracting documents, that move was overturned because of a ruling that more market research needs to be conducted to support a decision to justify a sole source award.
Keep reading this article at: https://fcw.com/articles/2018/08/23/gsa-sam-recompete.aspx
For years, government agencies have tried to find ways to make the purchasing process more efficient. But now the Air Force has come to the conclusion that humans cannot on their own manage the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), 1,897 pages of the densest prose on the planet. The only way to navigate a stifling bureaucracy that virtually everyone agrees it is broken, is to turn to the power of the machine.
The Air Force is currently working with two vendors, both of which have chosen Watson, IBM’s cognitive learning computer, to develop programs that would harness artificial intelligence to help businesses and government acquisitions officials work through the mind-numbing system.
The idea is to create a “bureaucracy buster, or let’s call it a decoder,” said Camron Gorguinpour, a senior official in the Air Force’s acquisitions office.
Keep reading this article at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-pentagons-procurement-system-is-so-broken-they-are-calling-on-watson/2016/03/18/a6891158-ec6a-11e5-a6f3-21ccdbc5f74e_story.html
The Homeland Security Department will award contracts to multiple companies to fix a long-suffering program aimed at computerizing immigration paperwork, after a lackluster job by the current vendor, according to federal officials and internal memos.
The original five-year, $536,000 plan for “Transformation” has grown into a potentially two-decade effort that, officials told Nextgov, could cost more than $3 billion if not stopped. So far, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a DHS agency, has created one online form with the $792.6 million it has spent since contracting with system developer IBM in 2008. It is unclear how much of that sum went directly to IBM.
Keep reading this article at http://www.nextgov.com/defense/2012/12/dhs-recompete-online-immigration-program-crisis/60144/?oref=homeland_security_nl.
