DoD plans upgrade to COBOL-based contract system

WHAT: The Department of Defense wants ideas on upgrading its legacy contract management system.

WHY: The Mechanization of Contract Administration Services (MOCAS) is very, very old. The contract management and payment system celebrated its 50^th birthday in 2008 -- back then the Defense Contract Management Agency noted that the ancient, COBOL-based system had most recently cheated death in 2002, and bragged that it would probably be around for another 20 to 30 years.

According to a July 7 request for information posted by DCMA, however, reports of the survival of MOCAS may be exaggerated.

Right now, DCMA isn't looking for proposals for a replacement system, but for ideas on how to best convert a sprawling mainframe system with more than 2 million lines of programming code (in COBOL and the database language Mantis), supporting 50 interfaces with DoD financial and contract writing systems with a more modern, integrated solution.

The stakes are high. DCMA manages 334,000 contracts valued at about $1.2 trillion, and payments from the MOCAS system "represent a very large percentage of dollars paid to vendors" by DoD.

DCMA is looking for insight on approaches to modernizing legacy systems, approaches to data conversion, timelines and personnel required for a massive upgrade, required changes to business processes, and recommendations on programming languages or technologies that can handle the transaction volume and large user population currently supported by MOCAS.