DoD preparing to recompete contract for Advana

The Defense Department is preparing to recompete the contract for Advana, the department’s biggest data platform for advanced analytics, to better support its rapidly growing user base.

For the last three years, the General Services Administration’s Federal Systems Integration and Management Center has supported most of the lifecycle IT support for the Advana platform, including assisting with the acquisition and ongoing maintenance of the system.

But the platform, which was originally developed to support the comptroller’s office, has grown exponentially. Advana now houses everything from financial management to personnel, logistics and management data for roughly 100,000 users, so the existing management model provided by the GSA’s FedSIM service is no longer effective enough to meet the platform’s expanded requirements.

“Advana was like a victim of its own success — it scaled tremendously over the last few years. And that data infrastructure itself — we’re doing some internal upgrades — I think, will benefit from an overall look at the data engineering and kind of what the right solutions are for the back-end architecture,” Radha Plumb, the Pentagon’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, said during the Center for Strategic and International Studies event on Monday.

“We are looking forward to going through that competitive process to see who’s interested in working with us on that.”

Moving away from the current acquisition approach and introducing more vendors into the process will allow the CDAO to create a “clear data infrastructure investment” in a more modular way.

“We are now looking at what the next journey for Advana looks like. How do we make sure we build the right back-end data architecture, the right enterprise-level analytics and we have the right acquisition strategy to make sure that it can launch into the future just as successfully as it has over the last several years?” said Plumb.

Recompeting the contract for Advana platform is part of the CDAO’s broader approach to scale data, analytics and artificial intelligence capabilities across the DoD dubbed Open DAGIR, short for Open Data and Applications Government-owned Interoperable Repositories.

Open DAGIR  has become a significant initiative for the CDAO as it represents a major shift in how the Defense Department procures and manages its digital infrastructure. The goal for this new approach is to create a more modular, multi-vendor ecosystem, which will increase competition and bring in diverse solutions to support DoD’s data systems.

“It’s clear we need these different interfaces, it’s clear we have a bunch of mature applications that need to be scaled. And it’s clear we need an open interoperable data architecture. How do we get all three of these at once? So that’s really what Open DAGIR is intended to get after — it breaks that procurement process into three big chunks,” said Plumb.

In May, the Defense Department awarded a $513 million contract to Palantir for its Maven Smart System prototype. The Maven Smart System, foundational to the Open DAGIR initiative, expanded to thousands of users from five combatant commands beginning in June. The CDAO is now focused on aligning the recompeting process for Advana with the Open DAGIR framework.

“We’re working to recompete [Advana] in the construct of Open DAGIR, which again means that we need to compete the data infrastructure, the enterprise applications, which will probably be more than one particular application set, and then this prototype pathway for analytic applications that need to be tested and evaluated on that Advana stack,” said Plumb.

The CDAO plans to host an Advana Insight Day early in September. The office will start seeking solicitations shortly after the event.

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