P03 - JA Med Voice Signed 36C10A21AP0640 Redacted.pdf

Control Number VA-21-00086772

JUSTIFICATION

FOR AN EXCEPTION TO FAIR OPPORTUNITY

1. Contracting Activity: Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)

Office of Procurement, Acquisition, and Logistics Technology Acquisition Center 1701 Directors Blvd Austin, TX 78744

2. Description of Action: The proposed action is for a firm-fixed-price delivery order issued under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Solutions for Enterprise Wide Procurement (SEWP) V Governmentwide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) for a brand name Medallia Voice of the Employee (VOE) Enterprise Wide Software as a Service (SaaS) subscription.

3. Description of the Supplies or Services: The VA, Office of Information and Technology (OIT), Product Engineering (PE), Veteran Experience Services (VES), Veterans Relationship Management (VRM) requires a FedRamp approved SaaS license for an Employee Experience (EX) tool to collect, analyze, and act upon experience data in real-time to drive deeper understanding of the transactional and relational experience between the VA and the Veterans it serves. The VA requires an Enterprise wide EX tool that can integrate seamlessly with the existing Medallia SaaS Customer Experience Management (CEM) tool implemented Department-wide at VA, operating as Veterans Signals (VSignals). VSignals supports the Veteran Experience Office’s (VEO) and OIT’s Veteran experience improvement initiatives on behalf of the Secretary of Veteran Affairs (SECVA). The VSignals Medallia CEM performs text analytics, collects data via surveys, alerts and social media ‘listening’ and provides user dashboards in an easy to understand format. VA requires an expansion of the existing VSignals Medallia SaaS tool via the Medallia VOE to capture, engage, understand, and analyze the data captured. Further, VA requires a single integrated solution that can leverage historical data sets captured over the past six years.

The EX tool will combine the employee data set with the existing Veterans experience data to present a holistic view of experience drivers; collect employee feedback through an omni-channel approach with the ability to integrate with pre-existing operational data sets connected with the VA employee; integrate with current VA operational platforms to include Corporate Data Warehouse (CDW) and existing integrations supporting Veterans experience; engage with, collect feedback from, analyze alongside operational metrics and ultimately take action on VA’s employee feedback data; display a series of reports data and leverage Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze in real time and include all NLP functionality such as identify which topics (over 10,000) have the biggest impact on a desired metric; convert raw audio files to text files for ingestion into NLP engines; display journey analytics capabilities to bring together disparate data sources leveraging email, unique IDs, internet cookies and other identifiers to build cohort segments and view their journey end to end. These capabilities are available with the Medallia License that is a proprietary software.

Medallia VOE Enterprise wide SaaS subscription Control Number VA-21-00086772

The period of performance is 12-month base period and two 12-month option periods.

The total estimated value of this proposed action is inclusive of all option periods.

4. Statutory Authority: Pursuant to Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 16.505(a)(4), the following brand name requirement is being justified and approved as an exception to fair opportunity under the statutory authority of Section 41 U.S.C. 4106(c)(2) as implemented by FAR 16.505(b)(2)(i)(B), entitled “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”.

5. Rationale Supporting Use of Authority Cited Above: Based on market research, as described in section 8 of this justification, the Government has determined that limited competition is available among authorized resellers for the required Medallia VOE Enterprise wide SaaS subscription. VA implemented the VSignals Medallia CEM, a SaaS tool, in 2016. The Medallia CEM, operating as VSignals, is currently implemented in all Veterans Health Administration, Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA), National Cemetery Administration (NCA), and Board of Veterans Appeals (BVA) offices in support of the VEO and OIT’s Veteran experience improvement initiatives. Medallia VOE is the only SaaS that can integrate with the existing VSignals Medallia CEM. No other EX software providing this functionality is interoperable and compatible with VSignals Medallia. Using another manufacturer’s application would require extensive reconfiguration to include a complete replacement of the Medallia infrastructure in place. Due to the Medallia proprietary source code, no other brand name EX SaaS can interoperate with the existing Medallia infrastructure. Replacing the existing infrastructure would result in estimated duplicative costs of approximately $10M which would not be recovered through competition, and a period of 16 months to reconstitute a new CEM tool. These estimates are based on previous acquisition history and comparable configuration and development efforts of similar sizes.

In addition, only the Medallia’s EX tool can integrate and leverage the historical data sets. Standing up a EX program of this magnitude from scratch and incorporating Medallia’s stored data and continuous collection of data related to EX, would take additional multiple years and a significantly larger investment than leveraging already current platform infrastructure, data flows, and user familiarity.

VOE has an exclusive embedded and managed integration directly into Medallia's Experience Cloud (MEC) AI and Machine Learning Text Analytics engine. This means the VA will be able to take advantage of the existing Text Analytic topic sets developed over the past six years under the VSignals program. Without procurement of this required tool, VA’s ability to further build upon its existing capabilities would not be possible and would negatively impact ability to provide greater level of care.

6. Efforts to Obtain Competition: In accordance with FAR 16.505(a)(4)(iii)(A)(1), this justification will be provided with the solicitation to all appropriate NASA SEWP V GWAC holders. Furthermore, in accordance with FAR 5.301, 16.505(b)(2)(ii)(D), and

Medallia VOE Enterprise wide SaaS subscription Control Number VA-21-00086772

16.505(a)(4)(iii), the award notice for this action will be synopsized on the Contracting Opportunities website and this justification will be made publicly available within 14 days of award.

7. Actions to Increase Competition: The Government will continue to conduct market research to ascertain if there are changes in the marketplace that would enable future actions to be competed.

8. Market Research: In January and February 2021, the program managers completed a thorough review of various websites and product catalogs to ascertain if there were similar products that could be used to meet the government’s requirements.

Additionally, a technical review was done of similar products, including platforms offered by Survey Monkey, Verint, and Qualtrics. However, these platforms were not compatible with existing VSignals SaaS and Medallia data sets. Additionally, the similar products researched did not possess a FedRAMP status. Only brand name Medallia can provide a FedRamp approved SaaS solution that can integrate with the existing VSignals Medallia tool to leverage the existing data captured and avoid the duplicative time and cost as outlined in Section 5 of this justification.

9. Other Facts: None.