VA seeks contractor to tackle 10 years of ad-hoc automation

Infrastructure teams across the Veterans Affairs Department have developed thousands of ad-hoc automation scripts over the past decade, while also having adopted inconsistent infrastructure and configuration management practices.

The cumulative result of this patchwork is technical debt that increases risk, security exposure, labor costs and delays in delivering for critical veteran services.

VA outlines these challenges in a new request for information posted Wednesday for the Infrastructure Operations – Data Center and Cloud Engineering Infrastructure Automation Technical Debt Reduction program.

VA wants to develop a contract for an enterprise automation control plane that standardizes, governs and operationalizes infrastructure automation across the department.

The potential contract will likely be a five-year effort covering 128,000 managed endpoints in VA’s hybrid IT environment. The prime contractor will work with a commercial automation platform.

The prime contractor will develop reference architectures, automation standards, policy taxonomies and reusable building blocks to help VA's infrastructure teams adopt standardized practices across the department.

The department also wants the contractor to transfer the knowledge and practices to VA personnel so they can independently operate and further develop the platform.

The contract will be a mixture of software and professional services. VA has not decided on a contract structure yet, though software purchases will be on a fixed-price basis.

For the professional services portion, VA asks respondents to choose among different contracts structures. This includes fixed price, cost-reimbursement, labor-hour, time-and-materials, or other. Respondents can also choose a hybrid approach by picking more than one.

VA also has not disclosed a dollar value on the potential contract.

Responses to the RFI are due June 12. VA is targeting a Sept. 30 award for the contract