Written by Dave Nyczepir
Immigration and Customs Enforcement this week released a $ 340 million solicitation covering the agile development, operation and maintenance of applications within a new center of excellence for evaluating emerging technologies.
The Scalable Ways to Implement Flexible Tasks (SWIFT) contract is mostly software -focused. It covers apps in four domains: Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), collaborative services, visualization and hyperautomation.
ICE planned to release the solicitation, starting with a new procurement model, in January but delayed a month and eventually extended the deadline for Phase 1 of proposal submissions until March 14.
“SWIFT is available for ICE, and on a case-by-case basis approval can be given to others.
DHS components of ICE SWIFT contracting officer and SWIFT program manager, “read the joint summary/solicitation.
ICE plans to post responses to industry questions about SWIFT by amending the solicitation as soon as possible. The amendment includes any additional Phase 1 extensions that ICE determines are necessary based on industry responses.
Phase 2 of the process does not yet have a start date but is set for next 2022.
The SWIFT amount of $ 340 million will be divided among the contract awardees, who can have up to eight – two per domain. PaaS and collaborative services domains are not restricted, but visualization and hyperautomation domains are reserved for small businesses.
There can be up to eight awardees under SWIFT.
Vendors can win awards across multiple domains, as long as they submit separate proposals for each, and ICE does not set any limits on teaming arrangements.
The PaaS domain covers ICE’s ServiceNow and Dynamics systems, as well as emerging technologies, with the goal of developing workflow automation that improves the user experience through self-service and mobility.
Hyperautomation combines technologies such as robotic process automation (RPA) and machine learning (ML) to identify, evaluate and automate IT processes. ICE uses UiPath and Power Automate for RPA, and a potential case of using hyperautomation creates a predictive algorithm that determines future staffing needs.
The visualization domain covers dashboards and reporting using Tableau, Qlik, PowerBI and emerging services with the goal of deploying a mobile app in the third quarter of fiscal 2022.
The collaborative services support SharePoint and ICE.gov, as well as a digitized deployment process for customer initiation.