DOJ picks six for services

The Justice Department on Friday awarded contracts to six vendors under a $475 million umbrella contract for a variety of technology services to support major DOJ information technology programs and other projects governmentwide.

The contract, DOJ's Information Technology Support Service 2000 (ITSS 2000) project, replaces the $152 million ITSS contract awarded in 1996 to eight vendors, including DynCorp, Keane Federal Systems Inc. and Logicon Inc.

Those three vendors, in addition to Computer Sciences Corp., Lockheed Martin Services Inc. and Pragmatics Inc., won contracts for the five-year ITSS 2000 program and will compete for individual task orders.

Linda Burek, acting deputy assistant attorney general for information resources management at DOJ, described the ITSS 2000 and the current ITSS contracts as key procurement vehicles for DOJ agencies. "For many of our organizations, it's the primary contract vehicle that they use," she said, explaining that many smaller offices use the ITSS contract instead of conducting their own procurements. "It gives the [agencies] the ability to reach IT services quickly."

Work under the existing ITSS contract has included projects for developing software to track all the correspondence that comes into DOJ, Burek said. ITSS vendors also have performed engineering work on the department's Justice Consolidated Office Network II program and provided support services for the Immigration and Naturalization Service's Technology Infrastructure Project.

Burek said she expects the department to use ITSS 2000 for projects such as the Joint Automated Booking Station project, which should streamline the information-

collection process for DOJ agencies that book criminals and suspects. "I would expect that this is the most likely vehicle that we would use to obtain those services," she said.

DOJ issued its own contract instead of using other departments' governmentwide contracts because of security concerns, said Janis Sposato, deputy assistant attorney general for law and policy. "The DOJ tends to have some different security or confidentiality requirements [for vendors]," she said.

Kim Nguyen, director of special programs at Pragmatics, the only small business on ITSS 2000, said the contract represented a "huge win" for his company, which so far has had no contracts with DOJ. But the company is a vendor on a $330 million Army contract and a $610 million Defense Information Systems Agency contract.

Nguyen said Pragmatics will focus on delivering to DOJ services such as information systems for satellite communications and systems supporting command and control of special operations, such as those that might be performed by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Work under the contract will begin June 1.