Accenture [ACN] in September received its first task order, valued at $60 million over two years, under a potential $250 million contract it won with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in the spring to consolidate the agencies disparate threat assessment infrastructures.
Part of what it comes down to is consolidating the various databases that currently exist to store, adjudicate and vet information about various populations, including people that apply for and receive Transportation Worker Identification Credentials, Hazardous Materials Endorsements Threat Assessment Program, Alien Flight School registrants and others, Ken Lawhorn, who leads Accenture’s TSA work, tells HSR.
The Transportation Threat Assessment and Credentialing (TTAC) Infrastructure Modernization (TIM) will get TSA’s customers “into one data base” and that will give the agency better visibility while allowing it to interface with multiple enrollment processes, Lawhorn says. The goal is to ultimately make the customer’s experience faster and more efficient, he says.
Lawhorn says that currently there about 30 to 35 separate databases for different population sets for which individual threat assessments are conducted. TSA’s TTAC security threat assessment infrastructure was originally designed to handle about 2.5 million individuals per year although the agency currently provides vetting and credential services for about 12.5 million people annually. That number is expected to grow to 20 million during the next two years and at least double within the next five years, the agency says.
“The idea is that when people apply for a credential they get it as quick as possible so that there’s no delay in the work that they need to do,” Lawhorn says. “The customer experience will be a lot different. One of the big benefits is we’re looking to thinks like auto-adjudication. [For] Applicants that don’t come back with derogatory information, the business process solution should go a lot faster versus requiring any human interaction.”
For TSA the TIM program will provide the agency with more user friendly technology that will enable it to more easily onboard additional populations, Lawhorn says.
TSA awarded Accenture the TIM contract in April but the obligation of funds was held up pending resolution of protests by BAE Systems and IBM [IBM] (HSR, April 11 and 25).
The TIM award followed a somewhat related contract that TSA selected Safran Group’s MorphoTrust business unit for, which is to provide the agency with a Universal Enrollment Service (UES) that will consolidate the agency’s enrollment and registration programs (HSR, April 11). The UES essentially represents the front end of the enrollment process while TIM is the backend processing.
Lawhorn says that one of biggest challenges around the database consolidation deal with making sure of the data quality and linking the proper information around credentials.
What we’re trying to do is put more standard rigorous process around, once it comes in, it’s going to be clean, so you’re going to have information you can rely on and act on,” he says.
Accenture will also be standing up a case management application, which will automate business process management that in turn will “drive efficiencies into the business,” Lawhorn says. Most of the case work today is manual, he says, and with the case management application that will help eliminate bottlenecks.
The focus of the initial task order is the TWIC population while leveraging the Department of Homeland Security’s cloud architecture that the department is implementing into its data centers, Lawhorn says. Additionally, the system will be built using reusable services through a service oriented architecture framework, he says.
“The intent of this is to not only have a program for serving TWIC—TSA and the maritime customer—but also be meeting some DHS requirements because they have 117 different vetting and enrollment systems,” Lawhorn says. “And the idea is why do you need all these systems? This is the first step in potentially consolidating some of that.”
Lawhorn says that task orders for TIM can be awarded concurrently.