COE Phase II Questions

[KGreenSapient]

Question/Comment

Name and affiliation

• Kyle Green
• Business Development
• Sapient

What event(s) would you like to discuss?

• Industry Day
• Customer Experience
• Data Analytics
• H2A Visas
• IT Infrastructure Optimization
• Voice of the Customer

Your questions or thoughts

Overall questions

How does GSA/USDA plan to release and deploy the Phase II COE RFPs? Is there an interdependence among the COEs in which work for certain COEs needs to commence before others? For example, does IT Infrastructure/Cloud need to start before Contact Center or H-2A VISA work can commence because the IT Infrastructure/Cloud COE is a building block for other COEs?

Is there a staggered timeline for issuance of the RFPs? Is there a master delivery timeline of the associated tasks due to the independence of the COE’s products/solutions?

Are the proposed RFPs/contracts only for use by USDA or will they be used to support other initiatives?

IT Infrastructure Cloud

Given that USDA is “scheduled” to release their Fair Opportunity to the Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS), also referred to as Network Services 2020 (NS 2020), offerors are to provide Telecommunications/infrastructure solution(s) for an enterprise solution. How does the COE objective to provide a common/integrated Infrastructure and migration to the Cloud align with the EIS award and USDA rollout timeline?

Are they interdependent? Does the New EIS Telecommunications/Security Infrastructure need to be in place prior to the work described in Phase 2 COE: IT Infrastructure & Cloud? Or is the plan to commence in the current USDA infrastructure environment (17+ LANs/Networks), then in a second step, integrate the Phase II work into the EIS solution that is deployed?

Given that USDA currently has Cloud contracts with AWS and Microsoft: Is the intent to use these vehicles/tools procured under the existing contracts? Or, is it the intent to restructure the Cloud vehicles to provide more functionality, scalability, etc., and then under the Phase II COE, move existing and re-engineered systems to the cloud?

H-2A VISA

Given that Farmers.gov was rolled out in February 2018-time frame, is the intent that the design, features developed for Phase I be foundational for the follow on work performed in Phase II? Or, is there an opportunity to redesign the functionality, ability to interact, and visualization, for a farmer, producer, or rancher to obtain/update and add relevant data?

Is the Mobile App initiative approved under the Technology Management Innovation Fund (TMF) part of this task?

What dependencies exist before rollout for an update/enhanced Farmers.gov can commence?

Does the current Farmers.gov have FISMA authorization to Operate (ATO) or an Interim ATO?

Customer Experience

Does USDA anticipate having future needs for CX Design work, including information architecture, visual design, and content strategy?

Data and Analytics Capacity Building

Is the focus to enable the use of the data repositories by various “authorized personnel” and thus is the purpose of the data inventory, record keeping, etc., requirements to support access to the right information? data inventory, etc?

Is it intended that the data is for use on a Role Based accessed basis?

Is the audience USDA employees in their roles?

Is the vision that individual ranchers, farmers, and producers can view their data, update, add, etc, as needed?

Is it also the intent that the requestor can query the system similar to a Google search and be provided the information independent of where it resides?

Will there also be a view of the data available for researchers, the public, etc, that provides the data at a higher level so that business/privacy information of an individual/rancher/farmer/producer is not exposed? Or, is this another desired feature?

In order to allow multiple categories of individuals in various roles to use the data for analytics, is a bibliographic type description required for each data source? For example, knowledge of data describing what type of data and for what period, is available in the File/repository?

Is the intent to help the customer find data that they need and want?

Voice of the Customer

Does this overlap with the intent of Customer Experience (internal and external)? And Contact Center (internal)?

Is this intended as an ongoing collaboration with a representative sample of the various customer communities to adjust to changing needs and wants?

If not, please expand the description for Voice of the Customer?

[oghaffari]

Thank you for your questions. We are still hard at work incorporating feedback from the Industry Day and one-on-one sessions, as well as taking into consideration the needs of USDA.

Although we can’t answer most of these questions at this time, we believe that many of the answers can be found by reviewing the solicitations when they are issued. For any remaining unanswered questions, please ask your question again under the individual procurement pages when they appear and we will answer as quickly as we can.

In regard to your questions about non-CoE activity, or internal plans of GSA or USDA, we cannot comment on those.