White House CIO Needs Contractor to Help with App Development

The Executive Office of the President has a new chief information officer and is now looking for a contractor to help the White House develop, deploy and manage IT applications.

The Office of the Chief Information Officer—which got a new leader earlier this month, Roger L. Stone—posted a request for information Monday for an “omnibus” contract vehicle that will cover a host of IT application development needs, including lifecycle management; development, design and integration; administration, operations and support; and security, among others.

Based on preliminary information, the office appears to be leaning toward a single award, five-year indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract to a vendor who can “provide application services from inception to production support,” according to a notice posted Friday to FedBizOpps.

The accompanying scope of work document includes seven functional areas:

• application program management and product management
• application development/engineering, design and integration
• application administration, operations and support
• security
• assurance and testing
• quality assurance and testing
• application licenses and subscription

While the documents outline the specific kinds of IT practices the office is interested in—e.g., using agile methods during development and maintaining updated security patches—it offers little insight into the kind of applications the vendor will be developing.

However, there are a few clues as to the type of work covered by the contract. For instance, under the development and design heading, the scope includes work on commercial off-the-shelf and government-built tools for web platforms, case management software, database management and decommissioning older apps. The most specific work listed in the documents is “application related work required for the presidential transition, such as application reset/initialization, user management and administration as required by the government.”

The request for information is looking to gather data on the vendors who would be interested in bidding on this opportunity, as well as feedback on the scope of work before issuing a final request for proposals.

Questions on the RFI are due no later than Wednesday. Responses are due by 11:59 a.m. Friday.