General Dynamics wins Space technology management work

General Dynamics Corp. won a five-year $9.6 million prime contract to implement and support a new information management system at the Space and Missile Systems Center.

The Falls Church, Va., systems integrator's Advanced Information Systems sector will implement an intranet software solution, called Livelink Knowledge Management System, at the Space and Missile Systems Center at Los Angeles Air Force Base, Calif.

The solution is a product of Open Text Corp. of Waterloo, Canada, a company specializing in enterprise content management solutions.

This collaborative knowledge management solution lets dispersed organizations set up projects in a virtual workspace where users can easily share information and build system workflows such as staff summaries or document review processes, said Steve Eng, program manager at General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems.

Livelink also can be externally accessed through a secure extranet architecture that lets users into the system so they can collaborate with their mission partners, he added.

Although General Dynamics has performed this work for the Space and Missile Systems Center for the past two and a half years, this is a new and larger contract for the company, Eng said.

General Dynamics has helped move the center's local home computer directories and shared drives onto the Livelink system, which lets users easily search the repository of information, he said.

"It's kind of equivalent to their Google or a portal," he said.

Under the new contract, the company's work includes engineering services to develop and carry out the business processes for the center's space mission information management system and operations and maintenance services. General Dynamics also will provide staff to man a Livelink helpdesk and to train 6,000 users.

Before the implementation of the knowledge management system, the Space and Missile Systems Center only had network file shares and file storage system services, Eng said. Each organization within the center handled its own data using different products, he added.

The new system gives the center a single document management system that lets users share data with their mission partners, contractors and other organizations, Eng said. It also allows users to be more consistent with work and maintain compliance with regulations for official records, he said.

The contract has one base year and four option years. General Dynamics is expected to complete the work by 2011.

As a subordinate unit of the Air Force Space Command at Peterson Air Force Base, Colo., the Space and Missile Systems Center oversees the research, development, acquisition, on-orbit testing, and sustainment of military space and missile systems.

General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems of Arlington, Va., provides solutions for command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

General Dynamics, which has about 72,200 employees and had annual revenue of $21.2 billion in fiscal 2005, ranks No. 5 on Washington Technology's 2005 Top 100 list of federal prime contractors. The 2006 list will be released May 15.