Looking to start your post-holiday work week with some water cooler chatter, OrangeSlices shares highlights from a recent conversation with Will Rohde, Founder and CEO of QuantaHub Squared. One of the more vocal voices in this lengthy CIO-SP4 protest discussion, we looked to Will for some likely next step action options for NITAAC on this important GWAC. We also get some updates on the high-profile DHS SWIFT IDIQ and a new AI Cloud product that QuantaHub Squared is adding to its GSA Schedule.
Let Sleeping CIO-SP4 Dogs Lay
Drawn out over two years from the time of the final solicitation in the Spring of 2021 on a road littered with protests, corrective actions and more protests, it is fair to say there is an exhaustion that comes with talking about CIO-SP4. With those who were successful early on believing everything had gone as it should, those protesting clearly coming from a different view, blame being laid and defended, and the early ‘here we go’ joking on LinkedIn from those outside the fray silenced out of empathy for those spending time and effort trying to find a resolution, the only question anyone can reasonably ask now is, now what?
A Little Behind the Scenes
Part of a group Phase 1 CIO-SP4 protest, Will made the decision to continue on the protest journey without legal representation. “It was a $300 filing fee and was actually a good experience because I was part of the back and forth communication between NITAAC and GAO, the justifications, the clarification being sought, and the timelines that were required in responses on both sides,” he says.
Was it worth the time? You would have to ask Will about that one, but it does seem to have provided a bit of a behind the scenes look at the Wizard if you will that not everyone has.
What seem to be the Options:
- As part of corrective action, make awards to all protesters. Risk: Those who did not protest initially may have grounds for reconsideration and new protests.
- Award to everyone who bid. Risk: Dilute the field so no agency trusts or wants to use the vehicle.
- Lower the threshold and reassess across the board. Risk: Whatever threshold is chosen, given the emotional context now behind this vehicle, new protests are possible.
- Redefine and recompete. Risk: Seemingly risk-free but NITAAC will need to take time to really re-evaluate what went wrong and come at a new vehicle with a new strategy. This one though comes with a bit of heartbreak for those companies who have already spent time and money on the initial proposals.
DHS SWIFT Moving On?
Broken down into four domains and initially intended to be awarded to two awardees per domain, with a scope to include “all necessary administration, supervision, service, operational and maintenance (O&M), development, and performance resources needed to support PaaS, Hyper automation, Visualization and Collaborative service, it’s associated development and test environments, custom applications, and ensure continued reliability and availability of these resources” the Department of Homeland Security’s United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) RFP for creative delivery strategy systems designated “Scalable Ways to Implement Flexible Tasks” (SWIFT) appears to be moving ahead.
With the dust now settled on the May protest denial it appears first task orders may be coming out soon with rumored tasks of $5M and between $10M and $20M expected. The list of awardees to SWIFT is available here.
A New AI Solution
With the hyper automation component behind SWIFT, QuantaHub Squared’s new AI tool is worth a mention. Designed as a data engineering and AI platform utilized for ingesting and transforming data from a wide variety of data sources, training machine learning models, deploying, and managing these models into production, and bringing AI-powered automation at the enterprise scale.
Will explains: “With the biggest conversation in the world at this point is around AI with an expected global economy contribution of $15.7T by 2030 most people have no idea what it takes to build an AI model, then build the solution on top of the AI model which is the AI end-product.”
We have been working on a platform for the past 3 years through which a user can create their own AI Platform without any programming knowledge, driven by a user-friendly GUI interface. Imagine your own AI platform deployed in your own environment giving your organization the power of SecureGPT or any other Generative AI capability completely controlled by your organization.”
More on this to come……
Other CIO-SP4 coverage in case you missed it:
Federal News Network – GAO’s decision: “First, it found NITAAC’s record doesn’t show it reasonably evaluated the phase 1 offers…Second, GAO said NITAAC didn’t reasonable determine which proposals would advance to the next stages of competition…“GAO also concluded that the agency unreasonably evaluated specific aspects of one offeror’s phase 1 proposal…. recommended that the agency reevaluate proposals consistent with the decision, and make new determinations of which proposals advance past phase 1 of the competition based on the results of these new evaluations..” See more of this Federal News Network article here.
MeriTalk – “GAO recommended that the agency reevaluate proposals consistent with the decision, and make new determinations of which proposals advance past phase one of the competition based on the results of these new evaluations,” Kenneth E. Patton, managing associate general counsel for procurement law at GAO, said in a statement regarding the decision…“GAO denied the remaining arguments raised by the protesters, including untimely challenges to the terms of the solicitation, and challenges to other aspects of the evaluations,” Patton added…Patton said GAO’s decision was issued under a protective order, as it “may contain proprietary and source selection sensitive information.”.. GAO plans to issue a public version of the decision after outside counsel for the parties involved reviews the decision for sensitive information. It will also issue a separate decision that addresses the protests filed by firms that were not represented by counsel “at a later date.” See more of this MeriTalk article here.
FedScoop – “Commenting on the bid protest decisions, founder of federal procurement consultancy ProcureLinx, Mark Hijar, said: “This is a sign, to me, that they have some very serious retooling to do before they move to the next phase of evaluation. And for this to happen at this late date is not a good sign.” Hijar, who has worked with contractors who were awardees under past iterations of the vehicle, said he’ll be watching how the agency addresses the recommendation efficiently “without materially changing the evaluation criteria that were originally provided.” See more of this FedScoop article here.
As of the writing of this, NITAAC’s website has not been updated since the May 5 announcement that it had extended the CIO-SP3 and CIO-SP3 Small Business GWACs through 10/29/2023 so at this point, CIO-SP4 remains a waiting game.
Have thoughts on CIO-SP4? Have insight about next stages for SWIFT? Comment below to share your insight.
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On the CIO-SP4 protests, one other variation of an option you have, the “Lower the threshold and reassess across the board”. NIH could re-evaluate all the Phase I bidders that didn’t make it through Phase I but based on direction per the GAO protest outcome, we may not know the full details of that direction yet.
Also kudos for the CEO for doing his own protest. All can be done by the protestor without a lawyer as you all noted and per his experience. On a traditional bid, the protester would probably need a lawyer at some stage since the protesting bidder cannot see certain data that the lawyer would be allowed to review.