The Department of Homeland Security in July plans to release a solicitation for the next procurement step for its enterprise biometric repository, the Homeland Advanced Recognition System (HART), which is currently being developed and deployed by Northrop Grumman [NOC].
The July 7 solicitation for the Mission Support Lifecyle Service (MSLS) support services contract will be open to contractors on the General Services Administration’s Alliant 2 contract vehicle. The request for bids will be followed on July 16 with an industry day webinar, DHS said in a June 24 notice on the government’s business website, beta.sam.gov.
Bids are due Aug. 6 and a single task order award for the agile development services is anticipated on Sept. 18.
The MSLS program will be overseen by the Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM), which manages the current IDENT biometric database that is being replaced by HART. The HART system initially is incorporating the fingerprint, face and iris image storage, search and match capabilities of IDENT but is meant to drive higher accuracy rates, faster processing, scalability, and lower costs than IDENT, which is increasingly costly to maintain and difficult to scale.
HART will also enable the use of additional biometric modalities based on DHS component requirements.
“The Industry Day is intended to be an interactive exchange between DHS and the Alliant 2 contractor community during which DHS OBIM will describe their vision for the MSLS program and provide additional information about MSLS, and serve as an opportunity for DHS to gain valuable insight from the Alliant2 contractor community,” the DHS notice said.
The notice is a follow up to a Request for Information OBIM released in June 2019 seeking sources for the third and fourth increments of HART. Northrop Grumman is responsible for the first two increments.
The RFI sought to identify vendors capable of developing and implementing capabilities such as biometric examiner tools, a web portal, analytics reporting, person-centric capabilities, biometric matching, cloud security, automated testing and more.
Some of the Alliant 2 contract holders include Leidos [LDOS], which has significant expertise in managing biometric solutions, Accenture [ACN], which developed a biometric entry processing system for the U.S. after 9/11 and oversaw management of IDENT, and Perspecta [PRSP], which is supporting some Defense Department biometric systems.