ICE agile development contract slated for mid-January

Immigration and Customs Enforcement will issue a solicitation in mid-January 2022 for a new Scalable Ways to Initiate Flexible Tasks (SWIFT) contract that is intended to cover development and operational and maintenance support for existing and prospective apps within a new Center of Excellence.

The DHS sub-agency plans to support agile development of Platform-as-a-Service, hyperautomation, visualization and collaborative services applications through the procurement.

According to ICE, outsourcing the work to contractors with strong DevSecOps processes will allow it to scale the new procurement model agency-wide and evaluate emerging technologies, software and hosting options.

“Automation, continuous integration  and continuous development are viewed by the Office of the Chief Information Officer  as paramount to being able to successfully deliver value to our customers,” reads the draft performance work statement (PWS).

The Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) domain covers the ServiceNow and Dynamics systems, as well as emerging technologies, with the goal of developing workflow automation improving user experience through self-service and mobility.

Hyperautomation combines technologies like robotic process automation (RPA) and machine learning (ML) to identify, vet and automate IT processes. ICE uses UiPath and Power Automate for RPA, and a potential hyperautomation use case is creating a predictive algorithm identifying 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 by the third quarter of fiscal 2022.

Collaborative services support SharePoint and ICE.gov, as well as a digitized intake process for customer initiation.

ICE currently plans to make two awards per each of the four domains, with the hyperautomation and visualization domains set aside for small businesses and PaaS and collaborative services domains full and open competition. Task orders will be issued under each domain.

Vendors may win awards in multiple domains, provided they submit separate proposals for each, and ICE hasn’t set any limits on teaming arrangements.

Unlike the Repository for Analytics in Virtualized Environment (RAVEn) data analytics contract, for a platform only Homeland Security Investigations will use, SWIFT supports all of ICE.

Vendors have until 10 a.m. EDT on Dec. 30 to provide feedback on the draft PWS.