RFI-24-Service Management Platform.pdf

Request for Information

Service Management Platform (SMP)

United States Request for Information (RFI) Patent and Trademark Office Service Management Platform (SMP)

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

DISCLAIMER AND NOTICE REGARDING CONTRACT AWARDS

BACKGROUND

CURRENT STATE

FUTURE STATE

THE CONTEXT AND OBJECTIVES…………………………………………………………………...5-7

MARKET RESEARCH GUIDANCE

SMP RFI QUESTIONS

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS………………………………………………………………………8-9

INTRODUCTION

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is excited to launch Service Management Platform (SMP) effort as an opportunity to engage industry in an intentional, innovative, and insightful way. The USPTO is at the cutting edge of the nation's technological progress and achievement and information technology underpins every action and workflow process within the USPTO. The USPTO is the issuing authority for United States (US) intellectual property (IP) rights for patents and trademarks – as such, an important component of the USPTO agenda is digital transformation to improve and enhance granting U.S. patents and registering trademarks. The USPTO’s mission is to drive U.S. innovation, inclusive capitalism, and global competitiveness.

DISCLAIMER AND NOTICE REGARDING CONTRACT AWARDS

This Special Notice is issued for market research, information and planning purposes. This document is not a Request for Proposal (RFP) or Request for Quotation (RFQ), or a promise to issue a RFP or RFQ in the future. There is no USPTO commitment or implied agreement or understanding as a result of Government action or inaction taken in response to the RFI or the accompanying documents or attachments. This RFI does not commit the Government to contract for any supply or service whatsoever. The information provided in the RFI is subject to change and is not binding on the Government.

Participation in this process is strictly voluntary. No entitlement to payment will arise as a result of the submission of a response to the RFI or the response to any questions that the USPTO may ask as a result of the submission. The UPSTO will not incur or reimburse any costs for the submission of responses or activities associated with the preparation or response to this RFI, including responses to any follow-up information or action requested by the Government. Responders are advised that the USPTO is not liable for and will not pay for any information or direct, indirect, or administrative costs incurred in responding to this RFI. The USPTO has not made a commitment to procure any of the items discussed, and release of this RFI may not be construed as such a commitment or as authorization to incur cost for which reimbursement would be required or sought. All submissions become Government property and will not be returned, but will be handled in accordance with applicable proprietary markings.

The USPTO may use the results obtained from this RFI to support one or more future procurements. Additionally, the USPTO may use the results obtained from this RFI to make a small business set-aside determination. This means that if you are a small business and you are able to provide the content described below, your response may be critical in determining whether to set aside any future requirement in part or in total for small businesses. Any small business provider of the content described in this document is strongly encouraged to respond to this RFI.

BACKGROUND

The United State Patent Trade Office (USPTO) is a federal agency comprised of approximately 13,000 federal employees and 3500 contractor employees. The mission of the USPTO is to administer the laws and regulations related to patents and trademarks in order to promote industrial and technical progress in the United States and strengthen the national economy. The USPTO carries out its mission by examining patent and trademark applications; issuing patents and registering trademarks; disseminating patent and trademark information to the public and by encouraging a domestic and international climate in which intellectual property can flourish.

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 that the legislative branch "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). Under this system of protection, American industry has flourished. New products have been invented, new uses for old ones discovered, and employment opportunities created for millions of Americans. The strength and vitality of the U.S. economy depends directly on effective mechanisms that protect new ideas and investments in innovation and creativity. The continued demand for patents and trademarks underscores the ingenuity of American inventors and entrepreneurs. The USPTO is at the cutting edge of the nation's technological progress and achievement.

CURRENT STATE

Service Management Platform currently consists of the IT Service Management (ITSM) Professional and the IT Operations Management (ITOM) Professional modules of ServiceNow.

The Service Management Platform (SMP) leverages established policies and structured processes, performed by the USPTO to plan, deliver, operate, and control the information technology (IT) services offered to customers.

The current ITSM product (Service Now) manages the workflow of service delivery of the following: Request fulfillment, Incident Management, Knowledge Management, Problem Management, physical Asset Management, Change Management, Release Management, Service Level Management, Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and other integrated solutions along the organization value stream. The current ITOM module is leveraged to conduct discovery operations of USPTO enterprise environment.

FUTURE STATE

USPTO is looking to leverage the platform and additional ServiceNow modules, increase adoption of ServiceNow capabilities through formalized training, and enable citizen development on the platform. The USPTO is looking to leverage the platform to reduce complexity and technical debt across the agency.

THE CONTEXT AND OBJECTIVES

USPTO is committed to the following approaches to facilitate the delivery of the IT Product Delivery goals:

• Agile. To support development activities and meet target goals, USPTO uses agile methodologies, and new Agile ways of working. USPTO is embedding all key roles to either be physically or virtually co-located agile product teams to improve communication and interactions to deliver working software more frequently. This co-location embeds all needed skills on the team, and often in the form of cross-skilled individuals that have expertise in multiple areas and the ability to collaborate across disciplines and with experts in other areas. This co-location construct, in addition to vertically groomed backlogs and smaller user stories, clear understanding of product goals, and support by a dedicated product owner, improves the team’s ability to increase flow of high-quality, high-value software to the production environment.

• DevSecOps. (Development Security Operations) USPTO understands that to accelerate delivery of business value and foster innovation, a move to DevSecOps is needed.

DevSecOps is an organizational software engineering culture and practice that aims at unifying software development (Dev), security (Sec) and support/operations (Ops). The main differentiation of DevSecOps as opposed to DevOps is that the former introduces security at all phases of the software lifecycle: scope, estimate, plan, design, develop, test, integrate, release, deliver/deploy, maintain, operate, and monitor. DevSecOps principles highlight the need to detail business process and security requirements upfront and at every release in the form of epics and user stories, to successfully achieve continuous integration and continuous delivery and progress to continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD pipeline) in the future, as well as provide continuous monitoring and instrumentation/measurement of working software to the customer. A successful DevSecOps strategy encompasses working with all stakeholders involved in planning, designing, developing, testing, securing, integrating, deploying, continually monitoring, and improving the product. In a DevSecOps environment, Agile teams must adhere to all required escalation and release promotion processes. This move allows for continuous integration with proper governance and approvals, sufficient testing to meet USPTO’s quality standards, and a strict process for promotion of new features and defect fixes into production. In addition, USPTO is driving a comprehensive architectural move to micro-services that shrinks the size of deployments, de-conflict code, and makes the process more manageable for the team. Security is embedded in all development work and IT security is everyone’s responsibility.

• New Ways of Working (NWOW): The USPTO has recommitted to agile principles and practices for IT delivery. The USPTO’s focus is on empowered resources who can research, assess, and make decisions on how to advance from concept to delivery.

USPTO executives engage to set a high-level strategy and communicate priorities;

however, a majority of the decision-making occurs at the working level. Teams, led by federal product owners based in the business area where value is ultimately delivered, are encouraged to fail small, learn, and quickly pivot. The new ways of working aim to drive collective purpose, efficiency, and faster time-to-delivery.

The USPTO End User Services Office (EUSO) resides within OCIO and is the touchstone of customer service in delivering quality information products and services across the USPTO. Our work spans across the IT spectrum; from end user support of everyday tools strengthening collaboration to the video conferencing and webcasting services that have become increasingly vital during our remote work environment. Additionally, in our ongoing effort toward transparency, we work diligently to ensure timely dissemination of USPTO records to the public and other key stakeholders. EUSO supports and contributes toward the ongoing OCIO goal of IT Stabilization and modernization efforts to maximize technology and deliver quality products.

Finally, we develop ongoing communications to keep our stakeholders informed.

The Service Desk Operations Division (SDOD) is managed under the EUSO, and is responsible for management of the OCIO Service Desk, oversees Incident Management Processes, Advanced Problem Resolution, Account Services, Transition Support, and portions of Problem Management as it seeks to address major incidents. SDOD develops and maintains knowledge related contents such as technical and support documentation, and maintains the ServiceNow Service Management Platform (SMP), currently used to support IT Service Management (ITSM) Pro, IT Operations Management (ITOM) Pro, the Now Platform, and associated capabilities therein.

ServiceNow SMP is supported using three instances: Development, Test and Production. Current capability currently hosts over 400 Service Catalog requests, nearly 30 Change Management Templates, and platform adoption has resulted in increased demand for service catalog items, integrations with other sources to automate workflows and deprecation of disparate sources and methods to create incidents and fulfill requests. With continued maturity of ITOM Discovery and associated modules, demand of other capabilities shall also increase to further enhance existing ITSM processes within USPTO.

The vision for the USPTO’s Service Management Platform is to provide and integrate capabilities which enable the USPTO enterprise operate more efficiently by:

Empowering product teams and other offices to create and manage new services Improving management and collaboration within work environment to resolve issues more quickly Providing users direct access to self-service and other available resources, solve IT issues, obtain relevant and current information, and improve customer experience Automating of workflows and tasks to support quicker fulfilment and resolution of incident and requests Promoting and improving content of shared data, information and knowledge to support processes and support decision making Increasing visibility of IT environment and consolidating disparate sources to streamline control and accounting of systems, applications and services both on premise and within cloud environments Minimizing risk and costs to changes within USPTO environment

The vision for the USPTO’s Cybersecurity Program is to provide and integrate state-of-the-art cybersecurity services to enable USPTO secure business operations, to include:

Empowering product development teams by providing easily available, actionable data needed to identify and remediate vulnerability and compliance deficiencies Ensuring the continued safeguarding of personally identifiable information (PII), business identifiable information (BII), and Privacy Act information in accordance with the Privacy Act of 1974, the E-Government Act of 2002, Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) of 2014, and policy and guidance issued by the President and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Automating security and privacy control assessments to improve time to obtain an authority to operate (ATO) Automating continuous monitoring of system and programs Improving vulnerability and compliance scanning frequency, analysis, and reporting Improving cybersecurity monitoring through threat intelligence capabilities Zero trust architecture approach to on-premises and cloud environments Orchestration of multi-cloud cybersecurity monitoring, compliance, and incident response capabilities

The Enterprise Architecture (EA) Division is managed under the Information Technology Transformation Office (ITTO), which resides in the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO). EAD manages the USPTO Enterprise Architecture (EA) Program and is responsible for defining and maintaining the EA, for providing governance and oversight of IT investments and IT projects, and for ensuring compliance with the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) program. The Division creates and maintains EA architectures and artifacts; maintains EA data and models; and ensures that the EA data is available to support decision making.

The Office of The Chief Information Security Officer (OCISO) is responsible for all aspects of Information Technology (IT) security and serves a pivotal role in protecting USPTO information systems from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, and destruction.

The Security Operations Center (SOC) serves as a single point of management and reporting for information security incidents for USPTO, and is responsible for overall security of USPTO Enterprise-wide information systems, and collects, investigates and reports any suspected and confirmed security violations.

The Office of Human Resources (OHR) provides the leadership, policies, programs, services and systems necessary to meet the human resources needs of the United States Patent and Trademark Office workforce. This includes designing innovative and effective strategies and policies that for a broad range of initiatives relating to strategic human capital planning, recruitment and employment; administration of pay, leave, benefits, and hours of work; administration of payroll support and time-and-attendance controls; employee recognition and performance management;

employee relations and assistance services; labor management relations; and workers’ compensation.

MARKET RESEARCH GUIDANCE

This Request for Information (RFI) market research questions listed below are intended as information gathering and are not a solicitation for a contract.

SMP RFI QUESTIONS

1. Can you provide examples of similar government organizations where you’ve successfully configured, implemented and maintained ServiceNow modules and capabilities? Which modules/capabilities has your team configured and implemented?

2. What level of experience, knowledge and certifications does the vendor resources possess to ensure ServiceNow platform and capabilities are properly implemented and maintained?

3. What type of deliverables do you provide to assess progress and challenges with projects and implementations?

4. Can you provide examples of successful migrations of processes, technologies and data from external applications into ServiceNow?

5. What types of training/orientation have you created for your customers to support successful adoption of ServiceNow capabilities?

6. Which modules in ServiceNow does your group have experience in deploying and maintaining the ServiceNow? How large was the customer base for those deployments and how large was that technical support team?

6.1. Describe what worked well and what did not work well while working on the effort.

6.2. Describe your groups experience and how the effort was managed while working with different technical teams and many different business stakeholders on an enterprise platform.

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

NOTE: Industry engagement/responses are strongly discouraged from containing ANY proprietary or Trade Secret information in response to this market research request. Assume all information provided will be used and discussed with other industry partners and public, and additionally, may be used in refining the Agency's requirements or future market research efforts. If a company includes ANY proprietary or Trade Secret information it must clearly mark such information on a line-by-line basis. Inclusion of proprietary or Trade Secret information may lead the USPTO to conclude that the submission is not most likely to successfully meet the agency’s needs. This is a market research request and not a request for proposals.

RESPONSE SPECIFICATIONS

Page limit: 7 (Excluding Title, Table of Contents, etc.)

Title page must include:

o Company Name o Primary Point of Contact o Phone Number and Email Address o Unique Entity Identification (UEI) o Cage Code o NAICS Code(s) o Business Size Standards o Socioeconomic Category (e.g., WOSB, SDVOSB, 8(a), HUBZone, etc.) If your company is SBA-Certified 8(a) company, include the date of the SBA 8(a) expiration date. Please include “OTSB” if you are not a small business concern.

o Federal Supply Schedule (FSS) or OASIS Contract Number and SIN, NASA SEWP Contract Number or any other Government Contract Vehicle for which the products/services can be procured, if applicable

All margins minimum: 1 inch

Minimum size font: 11

Document format: PDF

Questions related to this RFI are due to the below listed individuals with the Subject Line: “SMP Market Research Survey Questions” – [Company Name], no later than Thursday April 11, 2024

@ 11:00 AM (EST).

All submissions are required to be submitted via email to Elizbeth Benites at Elizabeth.benites@uspto.gov and Navondi Bridges at Navondi.bridges@uspto.gov

Responses shall be submitted with the Subject Line “SMP Request for Information” – [Company Name], no later than Thursday April 18, 2024 @ 11:00AM (EST). The USPTO may extend the closing date of the RFI based on response quality or quantity.