By 
On April 8, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) Office of the Open Source Intelligence Executive (OSIE) posted a solutions solicitation for the Intelligence Community (IC) Data Consortium (ICDC). Responses are due by 12:00 p.m. Eastern on April 28.
On behalf of the OSIE (hereafter referred to as the Sponsor), prospective Respondents are hereby invited to submit solutions against the problem set for the ICDC effort.
The IC has a commercial data acquisition duplication problem and a costly commercial data replication and storage problem. The Government is seeking to award OTs to small businesses, nontraditional defense contractors, or traditional defense contractors if they propose significant involvement from a nontraditional contractor or provide a one-third cost share, with potential for follow-on sole-source sustainment contracts, to manage a commercial data consortium that unifies commercial data acquisition then enables IC users to access and interact with this commercial data in one place on unclassified systems while reducing data copying to classified computer systems. More simply, the Sponsor is seeking two broad skill sets to help solve the problems: 1) consortium data acquisition and management and 2) software creation.
The IC’s fragmented and decentralized acquisition model for Commercially Available Information (CAI) has resulted in siloed acquisitions of commercial data and platform licenses, duplicative purchases where vendors are often selling the same or similar data to many IC customers, bulk data ingest and replication, and limited data sharing. Efforts to partially improve this approach have resulted in exorbitantly priced enterprise contracts for commercial platform licenses that are rarely used.
In addition, the phenomenon of vendors reselling the same or similar data while implementing unique techniques to aggregate data makes it difficult for the IC to determine the differentiated value offered by each vendor. The Sponsor seeks an approach based on repeatable data management plus civil liberties and privacy best practices to help streamline access to CAI for the entire IC and make it available to mission users in a more cohesive, efficient, and cost-effective manner by avoiding duplicative purchases, preventing sunk costs from unused licenses, and reducing overall data storage and compute costs.
The Sponsor seeks a centralized approach to access CAI via three primary options—API query, platform access, and bulk data access—from commercial vendors by establishing a government-funded Data Consortium, which will serve as a clearinghouse for IC data requirements, a single focal point in negotiations with vendors, a compliance vehicle to ensure the IC’s use of the data complies with IC guidance and owners’ terms and conditions, and a mechanism to pool agency funds to achieve economies of scale when pursuing access to targeted commercial data sets.
The Sponsor then seeks a “zero copy” technical solution that prevents duplicative data purchases and reduces data replication and other cloud costs by keeping the data in place on the vendor’s IT to the maximum extent possible.
Review the ODNI ICDC solicitation.
Source: SAM
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