RFQ Attachment 3_Technical Scenario (12.04.2024).pdf

ADaPTS 2.0 RFQ # ______________________

Attachment 1 – Technical Scenario

The DHS OCIO provides enterprise technical architectural planning and delivery of enterprise IT services. In addition, OCIO is the DHS lead for Cloud based computing, in the private, hybrid and public Clouds. OCIO manages multiple, unrelated IT projects in the design, development, testing and staging phases. OCIO seeks to provide innovative business solutions, lower costs through shared services, and reduce the time spent marketing for new capabilities. As the foundation for customer-centric service delivery, OCIO establishes a secure utility computing environment where innovation, re-use, and quality are core principles. Additionally, DHS needs to modernize several of its existing business applications to migrate off unsupported platforms and improve the efficiency of OCIO’s application delivery functions. OCIO’s intent is to build these applications based on a suite of reusable services.

DHS is embarking on changing its approach to enterprise level information technology. For most of its existence, DHS’s systems were built by siloed teams who operated these systems within the silos. DHS is now taking an enterprise approach and wants to integrate its application systems as well as reduce costs, complexity, and duplication of effort that currently exist in its environments.

In this technical scenario, your company was just awarded a Call Order off its ADaPTS 2.0 BPA to modernize a DHS application system that supports both internal and external customers. The DHS application system has several core functions, including ingesting data sets and providing visualization of this data. Users experience continuous technical difficulties with this application. The DHS application system has significant technical debt from a poor cloud migration. Over the last several years, the application’s downtime has increased resulting in a decrease in user satisfaction. There is also a myriad of items in the backlog and the Government leads have struggled to prioritize changes to the application. When releases do happen, they are often riddled with bugs, or do not meet requirements. There is a need for an Application Programming Interface (API) front end application that allows for machine-to-machine communication (querying and ingesting of data), to enhance public/private partnerships that are important to DHS’s mission. This legacy application does not scale well and, as a result, the servers crash often due to the volume of data received. Additionally, there are constraints such as data security requirements where certain data elements are stored on the server while other data elements are stored in the cloud. As a result, DHS has a strong desire to move its primary sites to a cloud-based solution.

DHS realizes that its current Information Technology (IT) model is outgrown, expensive, and does not provide the means for DHS employees to effectively collaborate and quickly access information. As a result, DHS’s CIO now has the responsibility to consolidate all IT engineering and development services, which includes overseeing all aspects of DHS’s IT system developments to elevate DHS employees’ abilities to conduct their mission.

Your company has been tasked with modernizing the OCIO IT application system with the latest technologies to provide DHS employees with digital tools to be more productive and more effective in making intelligent decisions to support their customer base. Following the kickoff meeting with the DHS CIO and his Management team, you were given three sets of requirements to engineer, develop, and implement. Please address the following requirements and prompts/questions in your response to the scenario:

Requirement 1:

As mentioned earlier, each division within DHS has been operated in silos and rarely communicate with each other. As the result, system resources are old, perform poorly, and valuable information is not shared quickly. You are asked to provide a strategy to address the following issues:

1. Shared Resources – Please address the most cost effective and highly secure system for all lines of business to conduct their work without the worry of information leakage/ spillage. While each business unit is different and contains sensitive data, they should be operated freely within their own subsystem/domain. Please propose a plan to migrate the business data with the least disruption to users in each business unit.

2. Collaboration and Information Sharing – Please propose the most cost effective and secure system for OCIO employees (regardless of the business unit) to collaborate, to exchange ideas, and to share information across agencies so they can access the information they need quickly and do not need to re-invent the wheel.

3. Self-service Portal(s) – Please propose a system (or systems) where DHS employees can conduct research for past case studies, access white paper documents; submit service requests; and automate workflow for self-service access with the ability to download and enter multiple systems through a single access account. Users shall also have the capability to do their own password reset.

Requirement 2:

As described in the above technical scenario, your company was just awarded a Call Order to develop a new application system to support DHS’s ability to respond to emergent situations. The following requirements for the system are:

• Ability to view locations of Agency personnel

• Ability to view location of Agency assets (non-personnel)

• Integration with current Human Resources (HR), travel systems and asset management systems

• Ability to track and view which Agency personnel and assets are responding to an incident in support of the Agency’s mission

• Ability to view where natural disasters are occurring

• Ability to view where critical infrastructure is located

• Ability for the system to scale based on demand increases and decreases

• High level of cyber resilience, per DHS Cybersecurity Requirements

• High up-time availability, to accommodate 24/7 operations

Prompts/Questions:

1. Describe how you would manage requirements through the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) process.

2. Describe what technologies will be utilized and why.

3. Describe all assumptions made within the process.

4. Describe what types of systems that you would integrate with.

5. Describe how you will create a more reliable development and deployment process, including by responding to the following questions:

a. What can we do technically to address the issue?

b. What can we do culturally to address the issue?

c. What can we do to improve/enhance the process?

Requirement 3:

DHS faces many challenges and has fallen behind in using advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) in its operations. DHS would like your company to conduct a study and schedule a working session to get a full understanding of DHS’s immediate needs to shape the AI/ML effort. Your recommendations from the study shall incorporate the following considerations:

1. Improve productivity

2. Reduce errors and delays

3. Speed up business process

4. Improved customer experience

5. Improved accurate data-driven decision making

6. Facilitate compliance and governance

7. Cybersecurity measures and data protection