ICE issues $340M SWIFT development contract
Immigration and Customs Enforcement this week issued a $340 million solicitation covering agile development, operations and maintenance of applications within a new center of excellence for evaluating emerging technologies.
The Scalable Ways to Implement Flexible Tasks (SWIFT) contract is mostly oriented around software. It spans apps across four domains: Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), collaborative services, visualization and hyperautomation.
ICE planned to release the solicitation, ushering in a new procurement model, in January but delayed a month and later extended the deadline for Phase 1 of proposal submissions to March 14.
“SWIFT is available for use to ICE, and on a case-by-case basis approval may be granted to other
DHS components by the ICE SWIFT contracting officer and SWIFT program manager,” reads the combined synopsis/solicitation.
ICE plans to post responses to industry’s questions about SWIFT via an amendment to the solicitation as soon as possible. The amendment will include any additional extensions to Phase 1 that ICE determines are necessary based on industry responses.
Phase 2 of the process doesn’t have a start date yet but is slated for later in 2022.
SWIFT’s $340 million value will be split among the contract awardees, of which there can be up to eight — two per domain. The PaaS and collaborative services domains are unrestricted, but the visualization and hyperautomation domains are set aside for small businesses.
There can be up to eight awardees under SWIFT.
Vendors may win awards in multiple domains, provided they submit separate proposals for each, and ICE hasn’t set any limits on teaming arrangements.
The PaaS domain covers ICE’s ServiceNow and Dynamics systems, as well as emerging technologies, with the goal of developing workflow automation improving user experience through self-service and mobility.
Hyperautomation combines technologies like robotic process automation (RPA) and machine learning (ML) to identify, vet and automate IT processes. ICE uses UiPath and Power Automate for RPA, and a potential hyperautomation use case is creating a predictive algorithm identifying future staffing needs.
The visualization domain covers dashboards and reporting using Tableau, Qlik, PowerBI and emerging services with the goal of deploying a mobile app by the third quarter of fiscal 2022.
Collaborative services support SharePoint and ICE.gov, as well as a digitized intake process for customer initiation.
