DISA Selects Enterprise LLC Team to Develop NBIS Prototype

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has awarded a $49 million other transaction agreement (OTA) to Enterprise, LLC of Herndon, Virginia and several subcontractors, to develop a prototype for the government's National Background Investigation Services (NBIS) Investigation Management (IM) Shared Service. DISA announced on July 9 that it had made the June 22 award to the Enterprise team, which includes Pegasystems, Inc. of Cambridge, Massachusetts; Accenture Federal Services, LLC of Arlington, Virginia; Torch Research LLC of Leawood, Kansas; and Next Tier Concepts, Inc. of Vienna, Virginia.

DISA is developing the new NBIS system for the federal government, including designing, building, testing, fielding, operating, maintaining and securing the system, which will improve how the federal government conducts background investigations and help clear the backlog of 710,000 unfinished investigations. DISA unveiled NBIS at AFCEA’s Defensive Cyber Operations Symposium (DCOS) in Baltimore last month.

The contractors will deliver a prototype of the NBIS IM platform, an "integrated case management solution that will bring together the core functions of the systems and provide the interface for investigative users," DISA officials said. "The system will expedite the time to process investigations by automating and optimizing key processes from request initiation through investigation completion." The contractors will build the platform collaboratively with DISA using a scaled agile framework methodology deployed into a scalable, cloud-based architecture using a develop-security-operations pipeline, according to the agency.

Such an approach will allow for continuous integration and deployment of features faster, said Raju Shah, NBIS program manager. “We’re building a first-of-its-kind enterprise system that brings together the complex integration of a number of disparate systems on an unprecedented scale," he said.

DISA officials said that in this case the OTA contracting vehicle—a legally binding instrument to engage industry in a broad range of research and prototyping activities—is helping the government "acquire leading-edge technologies by tapping into a non-traditional defense contractor base."