ACQ-25-0468 SOO IT Metrics Benchmarking.docx

Requirement Title:

IT Metrics Benchmarking Study

Background

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is the federal agency for granting U.S. patents and registering trademarks. In doing this, the USPTO fulfills the mandate of Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution, which grants the power to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". The USPTO registers trademarks based on the Commerce Clause of the Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3). The USPTO executes on this mandate by delivering on its mission to drive U.S. innovation, inclusive capitalism, and global competitiveness in pursuit of its vision for unleashing America’s potential.

The USPTO IT budget is approximately $700M per fiscal year and is the second largest bucket of cost at the agency next to Patents. This includes personnel, contractors, equipment, and other types of costs. The largest pool of cost is contracts which include work on development of Patent and Trademark systems, maintenance of systems, transition to the cloud environment, desktop support, etc.

Scope

The USPTO is conducting a review to determine if the resources currently dedicated to information technology requirements for budgetary planning in the outyears are reasonable in support of the agency mission. The USPTO requires a custom study and report to provide metrics to determine benchmark in IT spending against other comparable public sector organizations or industries to help right size the amount of resources required for specific purposes. The Contractor will identify the comparable organizations or industries and the survey period and obtain agreement from USPTO prior to conducting the study.

Tasks

The Contractor shall ensure that the study provides the following:

1. The ability to provide metrics on Budgets and Spending. Demonstrate how much IT organizations spend, and what do they spend it on? This would include IT spending as a percentage of revenue and related metrics at various levels (i.e., aggregated and stratified into various buckets of IT spend as outlined below). Where possible, organizational risk appetite levels should be incorporated to identify those entities with lower risk tolerance that could result in higher cost.

2. The ability to provide metrics on Staffing. The metrics shall demonstrate the number of staff members that IT organizations have in various IT functions.

3. In addition to the above categories, data should be broken out into the following distinct buckets with benchmarks at various levels to stratify the IT spending:

1. IT Personnel

2. Business Applications

3. Data Center hardware/software

4. Energy/Utilities

5. IT facilities/floor space

6. Cloud Infrastructure (e.g. could cost surge and duration for moving on prem to cloud be identified?)

7. Network Infrastructure

8. IT Security

9. Voice/Data Carrier Expenses

10. PCs/End User Devices

11. Printers/Printing

12. Other

The various metrics should largely be compared in terms of medians, in various percentiles (i.e., 25, 50, 75th), as opposed to averages.

4. The Contractor shall provide in the final report a list of areas of spending to further research and recalibrate and shall present the findings to executive leadership.

Optional Phase 2

1. The contractor shall leverage the final IT Spending and Staffing benchmark report to support any additional questions or analysis USPTO may request, including but not limited to further analyzing IT areas of interest to address more specific questions that arise from the deliverable report.

Deliverables

The Contractor shall provide a draft Detailed Custom Benchmark Report due six weeks after USPTO submits the IT spending and staffing survey. The report will compare USPTO to various industries and organizations (including government sectors) of comparable size, and include percentile and median data rather than averages. The report will include any results of previous studies the contractor may have performed within the past five years in the metrics if USPTO has participated in any benchmark study efforts. The report will flag areas USPTO should further research as compared to benchmark data and provide recommendations. The contractor shall take the information provided by USPTO in terms of unique factors related to the business and incorporate the information, adjusting accordingly, and provide a final report for consumption detailing key observations, findings, and recommendations. In addition, the Contractor will be required to present the report to USPTO executive leadership once the report is final.

The draft report shall be delivered to the points of contact, provided by the USPTO’s Point of Contact (POC), within the Office of the Chief Financial Officer and Office of the Chief Information Officer via email. Upon receipt of the draft deliverable, the USPTO will review the draft within ten (10) business days, and provide comments at that time. Comments shall be addressed and final report finalized within ten (10) business days. The Contractor is responsible for coordinating with the USPTO POC of the resultant Purchase Order to confirm the correct email address to send the deliverable.

Period of Performance

Ten weeks after USPTO submits the IT spending and staffing survey. This includes four weeks for draft review and revision of the final report.

Option Period: Level of effort and necessary number of labor hours will be dependent on the questions posed after the initial report.

Place of Performance

All work described shall be performed off-site at the vendor’s location.

USPTO Point of Contact (POC)

USPTO’s POCs to facilitate this effort are as follows:

Rob Harris (OCIO) Robert.Harris@USPTO.GOV

(571) 272-3994

Hok Siv (OCFO) Hok.Siv@uspto.gov

(571) 272-0921 Form # USPTO-OP-021 (08/2020) Page 1 of 6 image1.png