CSAI - RFI_20251209.pdf

70SBUR26I00000006

Request for Information (RFI) – Customer Services, Accounts, and Integration (CSAI)

1. Sources Sought Notice

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a component of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is the Federal government agency that oversees lawful immigration to the United States.

This is a Sources Sought Notice to identify potential business sources with the capacity and technical capability necessary to successfully provide best practices to integrate online account experience to enhance customer service and interaction with the public seeking benefits adjudicated by USCIS.

This RFI is issued solely for informational and planning purposes and does not constitute an Invitation for Bids, Request for Proposal, Request for Quotation or obligation on the part of USCIS to issue an RFQ or award a contract. Should a solicitation be issued, USCIS may use the new FAR 8.4 procedures for Ordering under the Federal Supply Schedule, which follow the ordering procedures established by GSA in GSAM/R Subpart 538.71. This RFI invites respondents to submit a response to assist USCIS in conducting market research in accordance with FAR 10. Please note, USCIS may use the results of this RFI to help determine who can meet the need and will receive a copy of the RFQ in accordance with the procedures at GSAM/R Subpart 538.7103-3(a)(2). The government reserves the right, but is not required, to send the RFQ to those who do not respond to this RFI.

Additionally, the U.S. Government will not provide reimbursement for any information that may be submitted in response to this RFI. Respondents are solely responsible for all expenses associated with responding to this RFI.

2. Scope of Requirements

The USCIS Office of Information Technology (OIT) provides information technology (IT), expertise, and the strategic vision necessary to enable USCIS to deliver effective, efficient, and secure immigration services and products. OIT leads USCIS in the design, development, delivery, and deployment of IT services and solutions that are transforming the nation's immigration system.

One of OIT’s strategic objectives is continuous improvement of its operations and automation of internal business processes to achieve efficiency and effectiveness. One of the government’s missions is seamless cooperation and productive interaction among all parties involved. Professional and productive collaboration among all supporting groups is of paramount importance to USCIS OIT senior management.

USCIS needs to obtain professional IT services for the USCIS-OIT Office of Chief Information Officer (CIO) to operationalize the integrated online account experience to enhance customer service and interaction with the public seeking benefits adjudicated by USCIS.

The following are the main objectives to be achieved by this contract:

• Continue to create a unified, personalized, and authenticated account experience.

• Continue to standardize common form fields across USCIS applicant forms.

• Continue to reduce cost of servicing customer needs by enhancing services through digital interface.

• Continue to streamline USCIS content, improve content models, finalize, and initialize the governance structure.

The scope of this requirement includes, but is not limited to:

• Identity and Account Centric Data Services Provide a holistic view of an organization, attorney, and individual person’s current and historical state of their immigration journey (integration with various case management systems and identity services to unify the end user experience.)

Provide the ability to enable the identification of legal representatives into a common data set to allow for the management of their client portfolios.

• Proactive Customer Notifications Leverage a series of analytical models to provide proactive engagement to the customer community. (Leverage Analytical Models (AI/ML) to proactively engage with account holders where applicable, ultimately driving down the need for customer driven interactions through various live assistance channels.

• Data Directed Routing and Predictive Analysis Developing optimizing analytics tools that route customer requests to appropriate and efficient workflows.

Enrich requests to analyze key information to determine reasons for requests and ensuring analysis is delivered to the USCIS entity that can resolve assistance requests in the most efficient manner.

• Customer Experience Enablement Services Provide a series of reusable services and workflow that will automate aspects of the customer experience for better view of their own information, resulting in direct impact on USCIS resources.

Modernize Critical CX Systems and Implement Digital Modernization by removing the friction points or impediments that hinder customers from getting the information

Integrate new technologies while expanding services

• Enhance Account Services

Enhance the management of legal representative and organizational (and representatives) profiles, data, and relationships with beneficiaries to provide holistic ownership and relationship view.

Enable a unified view of client management such that all representatives and entities appropriately engage each other and USCIS observing appropriate privacy and legal protections and protocols.

Establish a base infrastructure to support Corporate (Organizational) accounts to leverage available data and provide service enabled views of account groupings based on data linkages available within USCIS.

Enhance and expand account services to enable online filing for additional populations and increase online interactions for both online and paper filings.

Provide role-based security to allow for viewing and management of customer profiles and case status information.

Expand intake to provide scalable approaches to enabling receipt of USCIS applications, petitions and requests for benefits.

Establish configurable, data driven capability to intake pdf applications in support of individual filers, Attorneys and Representatives.

The contractor shall be flexible to adapting to new and/or evolving technical approaches, as well as providing technical and program support to research, consult, and implement emerging technologies that the USCIS Chief Information Officer (CIO) deems appropriate to support the objectives of this contract.

3. Response Instructions

Responses are due by 10:00 AM Eastern Time (ET) on January 2, 2026. With email subject line of:

RFI 70SBUR26I00000006, [insert vendor name]

3.1 Interested parties are requested to respond to this RFI with responses to the questions in Section 4. Responses should be submitted in word format via email only to Patrick.C.Gadwah@uscis.dhs.gov and Katherine.A.Brown@uscis.dhs.gov. Responses shall be no more than ten (10) pages to include graphics. Proprietary information, if any, should be minimized and MUST BE CLEARLY MARKED. To aid the Government in managing proprietary information, please segregate it. Please be advised that all submissions become Government property and will not be returned.

3.2 Additionally, provide the following information in an excel sheet:

i. RFI # 70SBUR26I00000006

ii. Vendor’s Company Name, Address, Contact Person Information (including telephone number and email address);

iii. Vendor’s Unique Entity Identifier (UEI);

iv. Business Size and Size Standard / Classification related to North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code 541512;

v. Please identify DHS-specific or Government Wide Acquisition Contracts that you mailto:Patrick.C.Gadwah@uscis.dhs.gov mailto:Katherine.A.Brown@uscis.dhs.gov currently hold (including your contract numbers and the current performance period of that contract) that could be used to procure the services.

vi. Identify your business size and whether you are a large, or small business: HUBZone small business; service-disabled, veteran-owned small businesses; 8(a) small business; women-owned small business; or small disadvantaged business to assist the Government in determining the appropriate acquisition strategy, including the possibility of a set-aside.

vii. If you were to respond to this requirement when it solidifies, would you respond as a prime contractor, subcontractor or part of a teaming arrangement? If so, please identify the team and the role.

4. Information Sought

Interested parties are encouraged to respond to this notice. Please provide feedback in the following areas:

For the following 17 questions please share examples of your corporate experience and if available past performance to support your responses. Please provide contract numbers, contract values, performance period, # of staff you provided if you were the prime or sub or CTA, duration of the contract (1yr, 5yr) and performance rating received if available.

4.1 What experience does your company have with AI/OCR technology? What experience do you have with monorepos and deconstructing them to build a more robust and scalable pipeline?

4.2 What experience does your company have with creating new pipelines and what is your average completion timeline for said pipelines? Describe the types of pipelines your team has built along with the security protocols you have implemented.

4.3 What experience does your company have properly implementing Lambdas? What experience do you have with optimizing the performance of Lambdas’ functions?

4.4 What experience does your company has in implementing AWS best practices. Please include examples of how you have implemented AWS 5 pillars of excellence.

4.5 Based on prior contracts referenced in your response, describe the strategies you would utilize to be successful in an agile environment. What type of agile development practices does your team practice? Please specifically elaborate on any experience you have in working in a multi-vendor environment.

4.6 Under what circumstances would you recommend splitting a monorepo into multiple repositories? Please describe the methodology you would employ to ensure the transition is executed safely without disrupting CI/CD pipelines.

4.7 How do you approach the management of shared libraries (e.g., DTOs, utilities, Terraform modules) to ensure they are reusable while avoiding tight coupling across services?

4.8 What strategies do you use to isolate builds within a monorepo so that changes in one service do not trigger a global rebuild? Please explain your approach.

4.9 What is your recommended approach for structuring a monorepo that houses 20+ microservices, each with distinct runtime dependencies (e.g., Java, Node.js, Python)?

How do you ensure maintainability and scalability?

4.10 When transitioning a monolithic document processing application into microservices, what criteria do you use to define service boundaries effectively?

4.11 How would you design a microservice architecture for document extraction that supports scaling based on document type, image, and scanned TIFF files? Please provide a detailed explanation.

4.12 How do you decide whether to optimize for code cohesion (monolith), operational independence (microservices with individual repositories), or collaboration velocity and shared infrastructure (monorepo)? What key indicators would signal the need to switch strategies?

4.13 How would you define and design a service that handles merging and splitting accounts?

What considerations would you include to ensure that no PII is leaked to unauthorized end users?

4.14 Based on the prior contracts referenced in your response, explain how you would design a shared "document metadata" service. What measures would you implement to prevent it from becoming a dependency choke point?

4.15 Based on the prior contracts referenced in your response, under what conditions would you advocate for using a schema-less database (e.g., DynamoDB) versus a relational database (e.g., PostgreSQL)? Please justify your recommendations.

4.16 What factors influence your decision to create a long-running service versus an on-demand Lambda function? Please describe the architecture for each scenario.

4.17 Provide information and documentation on your CMMI Level Certification for both dev and services.

Reminder: This RFI is for informational and planning purposes and does not constitute an Invitation for Bids, Request for Proposals, or Request for Quotations.