Commerce to seek small biz to aid financials upgrade

The Commerce Department would like to hire a small business to be a prime contractor for the agency’s Financial Management Modernization Project.Commerce has already begun to consolidate bureau applications and servers. It plans to follow the goals of the Financial Management Line of Business, including ensuring strong internal controls for accounting integrity, standardizing systems, business processes and data elements and providing seamless data exchange between the Commerce and other agencies.According to a recent notice on the Federal Business Opportunities Web site, Commerce is considering using a contractor to develop a comprehensive strategy and road map to analyze options for financial management support. The road map will provide the architecture around standardizing and consolidating the department's business processes, administrative systems and technologies, user interaction and usability, data centers, security and integration components.This analysis will include an assessment of capabilities to be a shared-service provider for technology hosting and administration, application management, business process services and system implementation services as outlined in the Financial Management LOB Migration Planning Guidance.Commerce would require a contractor to continue current system maintenance support and migration support until its future state, including all design, architecture, integration, and deployment activities as well as sustaining this future state, such as continual business improvements.The department anticipates developing requirements, performance measures, inspection and acceptance procedures, as well as other areas of a request for proposal. The agency expects to conduct a presolicitation conference in May. Responses are due Friday, March 9.Although there is no prior contract for the requirements identified, Systalex Corp. of Rockville, Md., provided some of the services, including developers, testers, help desk, data warehouse and Oracle portal services.