proposal evaluation | The Contracting Education Academy

January 10, 2020 By cs

After 2 years, JEDI is finally underway

The second year of competition for the Pentagon’s controversial cloud contract was as dramatic as the first.

The Pentagon’s high-profile Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract is right back where it was one year ago: tied up in litigation.

The circumstances have changed in the past calendar year, with Microsoft winning JEDI in October and former favorite to win the contract, Amazon Web Services, protesting the decision in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.

At best, the Defense Department and Microsoft cannot begin work until at least mid-February, putting the Pentagon more than a year behind its initial schedule for JEDI. An internal JEDI strategy document released in November 2017 sought a JEDI award in fourth quarter of 2018 and migrations to the cloud platform by the beginning of 2019.

And yet, what unfolded in 2019 was high drama in the federal contracting world over an improbably high-profile government contract.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2019/12/after-two-years-jedi-finally-underway/162005/

December 20, 2019 By cs

Mixing politics and procurement creates a toxic brew

If elected officials are allowed to influence government contracting decisions it won’t end well for the public.

Imagine this: You are a mid-career government acquisition professional responsible for making an award decision on a contract worth over $400 million. As you evaluate the bids you also can’t help but see and hear the president of the United States openly advocate for one bidder. You’ve already heard, directly or through channels, that one or more U.S. senators are also pressing for this company to get the award. What are you going to do?

This is the heart of the controversy swirling around the recent award of a border wall contract to a North Dakota company for which the president and at least one senator publicly advocated. Was the award politically influenced? Is the company the best positioned to build this portion of the border wall along the southwest border? Since the company was deemed unqualified on more than one previous occasion, one has to wonder: Has the company taken significant steps forward in its capabilities to the point where it is now best suited to the requirements of the contract?

Of course we don’t know the answers to any of those questions. Neither does the president or the senator. And we may only get answers should another bidder protest the award and the questions are litigated. But that’s not actually the biggest concern this incident raises. The biggest concern is that we even have to have this discussion.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.govexec.com/management/2019/12/mixing-politics-and-procurement-creates-toxic-brew/161729/

November 14, 2019 By cs

Bid protests hit 10-year low

Companies filed 16% fewer bid protests in fiscal 2019 than the year prior.

According to data released last Thursday by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), vendors filed 2,198 protests in fiscal 2019, 16% fewer than were filed in the previous year. Fiscal 2019’s total represented 22% fewer protests than GAO’s 10-year high-water mark—the 2,789 filed in fiscal 2016.

According to GAO, the agency closed 2,200 cases in fiscal 2019 and sustained 77 of the 587 total decisions decided on merit. Fiscal 2019’s 13% sustain rate—wherein GAO agrees with the bid protestor—was its lowest since fiscal 2015. A large number of bid protests are resolved when agencies agree to take corrective action rather than GAO carrying the protest to full conclusion.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2019/11/bid-protests-hit-10-year-low/161168/

September 10, 2019 By cs

Patience you must have: No timeline for massive cloud contract, says DoD chief

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said he has no “firm timeline in mind” for completing a review of the Pentagon’s controversial enterprise cloud procurement and hinted that other factors may delay the program.

Speaking to reporters Sept. 5, Esper said the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General’s review of the Pentagon’s handling of the procurement, potentially worth $10 billion over 10 years, also hinders the future of the program.

“I saw where another DoD IG is doing another review. So in some ways, the timeline isn’t completely mine,” Esper told reporters Sept. 5.

Legislators, including Republican Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, have written letters to Esper asking for the award to be delayed until after the inspector general had completed its review. In early August, after pressure from Congress and reported criticism of the program by President Donald Trump, Esper announced he was going to review the contract. At the time, Pentagon spokesperson Elissa Smith said “no decision will be made on the program until he has completed his examination.”

However, Esper emphasized that the Pentagon needed cloud technology to develop better artificial intelligence capabilities, but did not specifically say that JEDI was the solution.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.federaltimes.com/it-networks/cloud/2019/09/06/patience-you-must-have-no-timeline-for-massive-cloud-contract-says-dod-chief

February 22, 2019 By AMK

Bots could be climbing another rung on the workforce ladder

Bots have been making some headway in the government workforce, performing the kinds of mundane, clerical, routine tasks that make the people who do them feel less than human.

But robotic systems may soon take it up a notch, gaining new responsibilities with basic but essential procurement duties.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently issued a request for information looking for robotics and intelligent process automation applications in the commercial sector. The robots would need to perform tasks such as evaluating proposals, automating market research, performing cost and price analyses, carrying out modification actions, and issuing price negotiation memoranda. The Pentagon’s top research arm isn’t proposing that robots run the show or take people’s jobs, but it is talking about the kind of jobs that might move robots up a theoretical pay grade from what they’ve been doing.

DARPA said it wants to look into the possibility of using the “operational efficiency and functional capabilities” of such systems to perform “routine administrative tasks and document generation in the government procurement process.”

Keep reading this article at: https://www.governmentciomedia.com/bots-could-be-climbing-another-rung-workforce-ladder