Active

Contract Opportunity

Description

THIS IS A REQUEST FOR INFORMATION (RFI) ONLY – Solicitations are not available at this time. Requests for a solicitation will not receive a response. This notice does not constitute a commitment by the United States Government and respondents will not be entitled to payment of direct or indirect cost incurred in responding to this RFI.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Acquisition and Grants Office (AGO), Corporate Services Acquisition Division (CSAD), located in Silver Spring, MD, is conducting market research for the purposes of assessing the marketplace and to learn of any changes in market conditions that have the potential to advance the objectives for NOAA. Responses to this RFI will assist the Government in developing and refining its requirements for the contract based on market trends and new technology.

Background

The NOAA Office of Space Commerce (OSC) Commercial Remote Sensing Regulatory Affairs (CRSRA) issues licenses for the operation of space-based remote sensing systems under the jurisdiction of the United States (U.S.) and monitors compliance of licensees to the terms of their license(s), regulation, and law. CRSRA’s current licensing administrative process is manual and time intensive. This process is dominated by three functions: communicating with non-governmental entities (e.g., businesses, universities) regarding the content and administration of licensing documents, populating or changing official documents derived from templates and forms, and searching and analyzing records for reports and other purposes. CRSRA is investigating commercial solutions for a licensing system to integrate these functions, automate workflows, facilitate record search and analysis, and provide licensees with “self-service” capabilities.

Purpose and Objectives

CRSRA is seeking industry concepts and approaches to a licensing system that unifies self-service capabilities and automated or semi-automated licensing process workflows with records management and analysis functions. This RFI is intended to open a formal communication channel between industry and the Government as well as to provide the industry with insight into the framework that will be used to establish licensing system requirements. The envisioned functions and notional architecture properties below represent a draft that describes the desired scope for this system. The Government is open to industry’s input in defining specific requirements for how this vision is met.

Envisioned Functions

CRSRA envisions a licensing system that integrates licensee self-service and automated or semi-automated licensing process workflows with capabilities for records management, search, reporting, and analysis. Specific elements of the envisioned system are described below.

Licensing Processes Automation

The objective of CRSRA’s future licensing system is to streamline the process of licensing non-governmental entities. Licensing includes activities such as: the determination of need for a license, the issuance of a license, the modification of a license, the termination of a license, and the submission of forms or notifications by the licensee to the Government related to the holding of the license. These processes are typically initiated by clearly defined types of actions or requests, are commonly repeatable, and occur within the constraints of well-defined timelines. Most of these processes can be rendered in graphical workflows or step-by-step procedures with information often exchanged in formalized formats that can be reduced to forms, conditional forms, and template letters or documents with fillable fields.

CRSRA envisions a licensing system that allows license applicants, licensees, and federal officers the ability to initiate role-based automated and semi-automated custom workflows related to the licensing process. Such workflows may vary based upon the existence of certain conditions or criteria or may be event-based. Ideally, the system would be able to track process timelines and due dates. Based on such timelines and due dates, the system could send role-based notifications to different participants pertaining to items such as the initiation of a process the participant is involved in, an action that needs to be taken in the process and the due date of such action, and the status of an ongoing process.

Licensee Self-Service

The ability of licensees to initiate a request to receive a license and to initiate tasks required for the maintenance of and adherence to that license (e.g., submitting requests for license modification, submitting notifications and certifications, etc.) is critical to the envisioned system. The licensee should be able to view each of their licenses and open actions with CRSRA; initiate requests or the submission of forms; receive and respond to license actions initiated by CRSRA through the review and certification of documentation, download of documentation, or alteration of information; or submit questions and/or open communication regarding the license or actions. Licensees should only be able to view records belonging to them and permitted to be seen by the Government.

Records Management

To perform its daily functions, CRSRA stores and searches a large number of individual records (tens of thousands). The number of records grows every day. These records encompass multiple types of information critical to CRSRA’s administrative record: communications, documents derived from templates or forms (including original responses, all subsequent changes, and derivative documents), notes, and spreadsheets, to name the most common. CRSRA envisions a system that is able to store these records and create updates to the record in real time as actions are taken and communications are made.

CRSRA must have the ability to search its records and filter and extract (report) the search results. Common searches include the content of forms (which may include text entries, geospatial data, and numeric values), events or event chains related to changes to existing records or the creation of new records, comparisons between forms (e.g., different versions of the same form, different forms from the same originator, or the same form submitted by different originators), data values and ranges, and metadata (e.g., date of change, date of event, time to complete action). Ideally, custom searches could be defined and saved for rapid access.

Records Analysis

CRSRA envisions that the licensing system will be able to integrate the search and report function with analytical capabilities. Examples of analytic tasks include process statistics, such as statistics on timelines to complete actions and statistics on numbers of actions or categories of actions taking place in a specific period of time (e.g., fiscal or calendar year). Analysis may also include quantitative analysis of numeric fields on forms (single- or multi-form analysis), or geospatial analysis based upon location data input into forms. Ideally, custom search-and-analysis workflows could be defined and saved for rapid access, or could run in real-time so that up-to-date analytics are always available and viewable through a dashboard.

System Governance

CRSRA is subject to a 100% record retention policy. All records are retained, and “committed” or official versions of edited forms and documents must remain searchable. The complete record must be able to be backed up at least daily to enable roll-back capability, and daily export to a local redundant storage location is necessary. The Government must retain 100% ownership of all data and retain access to those data at all times. CRSRA expects that the system will have Government security credentials, employ account access governance and role-based access control, and support security event analysis and auditing.

Notional Architecture Properties

From initial market research, CRSRA has envisioned an evolvable and maintainable architecture with the following properties:

1. Data Centric
   
   
   
   • The data are always independent and decoupled from the applications or services that use the data
   
   
   
   


2. Modular
   
   
   
   • The components of the architecture must be decoupled
   
   
   
   


3. Well-defined application programming interfaces (APIs)
   
   
   
   • Architectural standards for the graphical user interface (GUI) and the representational state transfer (REST) API are used for the system interactions with person entities (through the GUI) and non-person entities (through the REST API)
   
   
   
   


4. Containerized or containerizable components
   
   
   
   • Microservices – Components that can be integrated and/or replaced with components from other vendors
   
   
   
   


5. Open Source Software
   
   
   
   • Data Rights – Components do not constrain who owns the data such that vendor or license lock does not occur
   
   
   
   


6. Cloud based system that is provider-agnostic
   
   
   
   • Scalable up and out – no dependencies on hardware, replication properties, or cloud hosting segment
   
   
   
   


7. Monitoring and managing system component interactions
   
   
   
   • Audit system for anomaly detection and cyber security
   
   
   
   


8. Controlled Access
   
   
   
   • For security purposes, the standard GUI and REST API provide the sole external interfaces to the system
   
   
   
   

Information Requested

The Government welcomes industry comments, questions, and suggestions that will aid it in understanding industry capabilities and developing an acquisition strategy for CRSRA’s system. One of the principal outcomes of vendor/government engagement will be to ensure that alternate approaches that may reduce cost and budget, schedule, and technical risk are considered in the procurement. The Government may, therefore, utilize the information provided to refine its acquisition strategy to maximize competition among viable acquisition alternatives.

NOTE: The Office of Space Commerce utilizes Federally Funded Research and Development Center Contractors (The Aerospace Corporation) to conduct market research. An RFI response submission will be shared with the FFRDC Contractors, unless the submission directs otherwise.

Responses

Interested vendors should respond in writing to the following topics:

1) Describe the software architecture solution and commercial product(s) you would recommend (“your architecture”) for meeting the 5 Envisioned Functions of Licensing Process Automation, Licensee Self-Service, Records Management, Records Analysis, and System Governance. Include a description of the components and how your architecture accomplishes the 5 envisioned functions.

2) Describe how your architecture meets each of the 8 Notional Architecture Properties described in this RFI. For each, are there any potential challenges and, if so, how would they be addressed? For each property that is not met by your solution, what is your proposed alternative and any associated challenges?

3) If you have a partial solution that requires working with other vendors, please describe which components of the architecture you have proposed you could contribute that would satisfy the Envisioned Functions and Notional Architecture Properties, and which components would require a third party. Explain your reasoning and how you would do the integration.

4) What are the data rights policies in your architecture? Do the different components have the same data rights policies, or are the policies different for each component? If they are different, how do they differ?

5) What opportunities could present themselves with your architecture, including how your components can work with components from other vendors or developers?

6) What are the cost and budget, schedule, and technical risks for the development, implementation, maintenance, and evolution of the recommended solution(s) or approach? How would you mitigate them?

Multiple or alternative approaches are welcome. Although this RFI requests specific information, it is not intended to discourage creative thinking on the part of the industry to propose alternative solutions or approaches that the Government may not have considered.

Vendors responding should provide a point-of-contact, including the representative’s name, email address, and telephone number.

Respondents shall include the following information in their submissions:

Name of Company

Cage Code and DUNS Number

Business Size and Socioeconomic Status

Address

Federal Supply Schedule numbers (if applicable)

Point of Contact/Company Representative

Phone Number/Email Address

Delivery Requirements

The Government requests all electronic responses to this RFI by 2:00 pm local time (Eastern) on November 28, 2023 to the Contract Specialist, with a copy to the secondary point of contact to the email addresses listed below. Proprietary information must be clearly identified.

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