Justification for an Exception to Fair Opportunity AFMISC IHA Support REDACTED 06.23.2020.pdf

Justification for an Exception to Fair Opportunity

1) Identification of the agency and the contracting activity, and specific identification of the document as a “Justification for an Exception to Fair Opportunity.”

Procurement Office Agency: General Services Administration, Federal Acquisition Service, Assisted Acquisition Services Division, Region 7

Task ID: ID07200032

Description of Requirement: Air Force Installation and Mission Support Center (AFIMSC) Installation Health Assessment (IHA) Support Total Estimated Value of the Action: $ Period of Performance (PoP): One (1) Base Year + Four (4) 1-Year Options, 28 Aug 2020 – 27 Aug 2025

Contractor Name: Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc. (BAH) Procurement Vehicle: GSA OASIS Pool 1 IDIQ

2) Nature and description of action being approved:

Upon approval to use the exception to fair opportunity procedures of FAR 16.505, GSA will enter into a task order under the GSA OASIS Pool 1 IDIQ with BAH to provide continued IHA Support for the AFIMSC located at Joint Base San Antonio, TX, AFB. BAH, Cage Code 17038, is located at 8283 Greensboro Drive, McLean, Virginia 22102. The severable services task order will be a hybrid of Firm Fixed Price (FFP) and Time and Materials (T&M) with the majority of work being FFP.

3) A description of the supplies or services required to meet the agency’s needs (including the estimated value):

Under the contemplated task order, BAH will provide continued IHA Support for the AFIMSC Plans and Analysis Division (XZP). The AFIMSC-XZP is an organization responsible for providing installation and mission support across the Air Force (AF) directorate and its partners in the most efficient and cost-effective manner through the use of an enterprise-wide comprehensive and highly defined analytic agenda. In order to accomplish its support mission most effectively, the AFIMSC requires enterprise-wide full data science and data analytic support, to include modeling, simulation, analysis, data mining, machine learning, dashboard creation and visualization, data lake migration and integration, metric refinement, cloud integration, robotic process automation, data cleansing and record inventory management. These data science and analytic support elements have been, over the course of previous support efforts, integrated into and interfaced with a set of dashboards, databases and visualization tools, known as the IHA.

The AFIMSC has, over the course of two (2) years, implemented, matured and developed the operational capabilities of the IHA to provide support in the form of enterprise-wide data analysis, prediction and dashboards to over seventy seven (77) major AF installations across the globe, the Headquarters AF, all Major Commands (MAJCOMs), a 3,000-plus member staff of users, as well as supporting its key joint partners in the Army, Navy and Marines. In its four (4) years of operations, the IHA has evolved to support over fifty (50) current and ongoing projects, as well as supporting and enabling partnerships with forty five (45) analytic communities that provide direct and seamless support to the most senior leaders across the AF enterprise. This support enables the multiple and varied users of the IHA to identify and engage with real-time data on over one hundred (100) daily-use dashboards in order to visualize the status and analyze and predict the options and risks inherent in a variety of installation support services that affect almost every aspect of operations across the AF enterprise. Based upon this support, the continuity of IHA operations is necessary for continuing to provide AF-wide data reliability and predictive capabilities. This unbroken support will enable leaders within the AF to continue to improve the quality and timeliness of strategic and tactical decision making in support of AF operational and functional support areas across the enterprise.

The IHA requires data scientists that are proficient not only in business intelligence tools, including ‘Tableau’, programming languages, but which also understand the AF core capabilities of engineering, services, force protection, logistics, communication and contracting supported across the organization.

The total cost for this requirement is estimated to be $ over a five (5) year period.

The anticipated initial appropriation funding type is AF Appropriation Code 3400 – O&M funds, but other appropriation fund types may also be used.

The estimated award date will be in July of 2020 and the task order PoP will be 28 Aug 2020 through 27 Aug 2025. The task order will include a one-year base period, four one-year options, and one six-month optional extension. A five-year task order is in the best interest of the Government to minimize the cost and efforts necessary to re-accomplish this recurring task order while sustaining AFIMSC IHA Support, which requires specialized expertise and knowledge.

4) Identification of Statutory Authority Permitting a Fair Opportunity Exception:

FAR 16.505(b)(1)(i) requires the Contracting Officer to provide each awardee under a multiple award contract, a fair opportunity to be considered for each order exceeding $3,000 unless a statutory exception applies. The specific exceptions set forth in 16.505(b)(2) that preclude the fair opportunity process are listed below.

The authority pertaining to this specific acquisition is FAR 16.505(b)(2)(i)(B) Only one awardee is capable of providing the supplies or services required at the level of quality required because the supplies or services ordered are unique or highly specialized.

4a.) Supporting rationale (for the authority cited in 4 above) including a demonstration that the proposed contractor’s unique qualifications or the nature of the acquisition requires use of the exception cited:

Prior to the inception of the IHA, the AF lacked an enterprise-wide data analysis, prediction and dashboard capability. Data collection efforts were command- and site-specific, using differing tools, containing different metrics, and often resulting in corrupted or lost data based on user competency; these data were not able to be analyzed, used for predictive purposes or shared agency-wide. This disparate framework led to different assumptions and measures of success across the organization, lack of information sharing, and poor strategic and tactical decision making in support of AF operational and functional support areas across the enterprise.

In 2018, the AF Air Education and Training Command (AETC) sought to rectify the deficiencies in data analysis and to create an enterprise-wide tool that could collect and analyze data, create predictive capabilities, and provide a method for improving strategic decision making across the AF. The AETC, based upon this need, sought out a vendor that could provide full data science and data analytic support, as well as the ability to create agency-wide dashboards and visualization tools. This need led the AF to solicit the AFIMSC’s requirements in 2018. The AFIMSC sought a vendor that possessed data analytic and predictive capabilities, as well as core competencies that could enable a cloud-based enterprise-wide sharing solution such as AWS GovCloud services compliance, FedRAMP certification, DoD Data Impact Level security compliance, and the ability to provide real-time, comprehensive, and targeted data analytic reports to over one hundred (100) AF and client groups simultaneously using Agency-wide information collection and sharing.

The resultant task order, FA701418F5095, awarded on 08/08/2018 for a PoP of 08/08/2018 – 08/12/2019, received seven (7) offers and was awarded to BAH for the provisioning of data analytics, business transformation, enterprise-wide reform, change management and data modeling with the goal of increasing military readiness and lethality throughout the Department of Defense (DoD) by building organizational success through redesign, transformation and change management. BAH was selected for this award based upon its best-value proposition, including its unique AWS GovCloud compliance, FedRAMP certification, DoD Data Impact Level 4 security compliance and its in-house data analytics capabilities. This new task order support award enabled the AF to standardize data collection, analysis, sharing and prediction methods and became known as the IHA tool. In order to properly stand-up the IHA tool, BAH had to engage in an iterative and ongoing collaborative effort to understand the AF requirements, governance, culture and enterprise and begin to employ and roll-out broad software releases such as Tableau, . These efforts led BAH to unique enterprise-level competencies, GovCloud tailored agency-wide support and broad enterprise data understanding that would not be able to be replicated by any other vendor without a significant time and resource investment that would cause deep and protracted interruptions in the ability to provide real-time and continuous data analytics and predictions for strategic and tactical decision making across the AF enterprise.

The IHA analysis and dashboards were established in 2018 and, over the course of the task order, grew from simple data collection and organization to an effort that enabled enterprise-wide data analysis, prediction and dashboard access to over seventy seven (77) major AF installations across the globe, the Headquarters AF, all MAJCOMs, a 3,000-plus member staff of users, as well as supporting its key joint partners in the ODS, the Army, Navy and Marines. The IHA now supports over fifty (50) current and ongoing projects, as well as supporting and enabling partnerships with forty five (45) analytic communities that provide direct and seamless support to the most senior leaders across the AF enterprise. This support enables the multiple and varied users of the IHA to identify and engage with real-time data on over one hundred (100) daily-use dashboards in order to visualize the status and analyze and predict the options and risks inherent in a variety of installation support services that affect almost every aspect of operations across the AF enterprise.

Based upon the IHA dashboards built and maintained by BAH through iterative engagement and investment, as well as its proprietary test and development environments for behind-the-scenes data collection and analysis, and tools created to provide predictive assessments of data, there is no other vendor that can provide the AF with an enterprise-wide collection, analysis and predictive capability on the scale required to inform AF decision making processes. No other vendor can provide these capabilities at this time due to the substantial duplication of time, as well as the monetary and personnel resource requirements and investments that would be necessary to scale up the process of collecting data across the enterprise, applying data and predictive analytics to the data collection pools, building comprehensive and user-friendly dashboards and enabling cohesive outputs of data and information that can accurately and in real-time inform the decision-making process throughout the AF enterprise. BAH has developed unique programming applications and invested in obtaining highly specialized capabilities and experience in understanding AF agency-wide data inputs, needs and priorities, as well as logical outputs and predictions that relate to the specifics of disparate installations and commands and can be used at the local levels to inform strategic and tactical decision making. The information provided in the IHA dashboards allows AF organizations to accomplish their unique strategic goals and make use of available information in a manner that increases the efficiency and effectiveness of decision making. The utilization of one vendor to continue the IHA tool and its proprietary collection and analysis tools is beneficial to the Government due to AWS GovCloud-ready dashboard that is able to instantaneously draw in information and data from across the organization without the need to be recreated, tested and iteratively improved upon. The existing IHA dashboard is required to comply with Risk Management Framework (RMF) standards for IT architecting, security and monitoring, and maintain a Government-provided Authority to Operate (ATO), which can take up to two to three (2-3) years to establish.

Supporting the IHA also requires a software development and testing infrastructure, multiple software licenses, and an RMF-certified production environment. Companies competing for these requirements would need to purchase or lease hardware, develop new test and certification software, and establish working relationships to perform these functions. Additional duplicative program costs, an increased risk of interrupted service, and data integrity testing costs and time would be incurred if the IHA had to be recreated. In addition to the current proprietary test and development environments, BAH has also built development, testing, staging and future architecture test beds that would have to be reproduced by another vendor to satisfy the IHA technical roadmap requirements. Without these test capabilities, development of new features, technical refreshes, and evaluation of security patching for production releases would be at risk.

In order to meet the demands of increased capabilities and a continuously growing user base, a technical roadmap is required to sustain and modify the system to ensure conformity with industry standards and multiple evolving program office requirements. Because the system is actively in use, all efforts must be designed and implemented to be non-intrusive to the existing architectures. Finally, any break in service due to an attempt to recreate the IHA dashboard and behind-the-scenes analytics would result in the current enterprise-wide cloud computing capabilities being disrupted, data and information needing to be downloaded from the current dashboard and stored in disparate organizations, with no ability for real-time updates, sharing or reporting. These would result in the organizations that depend on IHA not being able to generate reports or make predictive assessments of data in support of enterprise-wide decision making.

Based on the facts presented herein, BAH is the only vendor capable of providing the services described in this document, which involve and are dependent upon BAH’s proprietary IHA dashboard requirements.

5) Determination by the Contracting Officer that the anticipated cost to the Government will be fair and reasonable

The cost of this acquisition will be fair and reasonable. Actions anticipated to ensure fair and reasonableness will be in accordance with the procedures and criteria contained in the FAR under FAR 15.4- Contract Pricing; to include technical evaluations and audits, as appropriate.

The OASIS Pool 1 IDIQ was awarded pursuant to full and open competition, and is an Office of Management and Budget (OMB) designated best-in-class (BIC) solution. Market research, including utilizing current OASIS Pool 1 IDIQ pricing tools and historic prices paid on the current order, will be utilized to ensure that the prices awarded under the new acquisition are considered fair and reasonable. Also, the OASIS Price Estimating Tool (PET) will be used to evaluate the proposed price. The final Award Decision Document (ADD) will be prepared and will contain all of the appropriate detailed documentation and justification for the fair and reasonable price decision.

6) Any other facts supporting the justification

The Government does not anticipate that more than one (1) qualified vendor is capable of providing an acceptable proposal for this requirement. A Justification for Exception to Fair Opportunity will be posted in accordance with FAR 16.505. Market research was conducted as well as a Request for Information and there were no other vendors that presented the required knowledge, expertise and experience as well as ownership of the current vendor’s data systems.

7) A statement of the actions, if any, the agency may take to remove or overcome any barriers that led to the exception to fair opportunity before any subsequent acquisition for the supplies or services is made

GSA will continue to encourage AFIMSC to research options available for competing the requirement in whole or in part, in its long-term planning for continuing support of AFIMSC IHA requirements. The AFIMSC is looking into options to compete the requirement, which would enable future support of this need to garner the benefits of greater competition.

An official posting will be performed on beta.sam.gov within fourteen (14) days after placing the order in accordance with FAR 16.505(b) for a minimum of thirty (30) days.

8) The Contracting Officer’s certification that the justification is accurate and complete to the best of the Contracting Officer’s knowledge and belief.

The Contracting Officer’s signature on the Signature/Approval page evidences that he has determined this document to be both accurate and complete to the best of his/her knowledge and belief.

9) Evidence that any supporting data that is the responsibility of technical or requirements personnel (e.g., verifying the Government’s minimum needs or requirements or other rationale for an exception to fair opportunity) and which form a basis for the justification have been certified as complete and accurate by the technical or requirements personnel.

See Technical Representative’s signature on Signature/Approval page.

10) Written determination by the approving official that the noted exception above applies to this order.

The Contracting Officer’s statement and signature on the Signature/Approval page evidences that he has determined that the statutory authority for the exception noted in section 4 applies to this task order.

SIGNATURE/APPROVAL ROUTING

Task ID# ID07200032

* Technical Representative’s Certification: By signature below, I state that I have read, understand, and agree with the technical information/representation made herein. I have provided the Agency and site specific technical information expressed herein, which is current and accurate to the best of my knowledge.

Technical Representative Date

By signature(s) below, I state that I determine the statutory authority as cited herein and expressed in FAR 16.505(b)(2)(i)(B) applies to this justification, and the justification is hereby approved on its merits as noted. Technical information was presented as being accurate and complete as received from the client, and was fully relied upon to document the request for “exception to fair opportunity,” described herein.

David Matthews Date

Contracting Officer’s Certification/Approval

Zachary Rich Date

Branch Chief, Assisted Acquisition Services Coordination/Review/Approval

Amy Cook Date

*Legal Counsel Review/Approval

Alan Searsy Date

Director, Assisted Acquisition Services Coordination Review/Approval

Mike McDaniel Date

Acting Competition Advocate Coordination Review/Approval:

George Prochaska Date

Head of Contracting Activity Coordination Review/Approval: