Earlier this year the Pentagon announced it would combine a handful of IT-focused but separate Defense Department organizations with the Defense Information Systems Agency as part of broader enterprise IT efforts. Now officials say progress is ongoing even as the separate agencies – which include the Army IT Agency and the Enterprise IT Services Directorate within the Office of the Secretary of Defense – award their own contracts for IT services.
Combining legacy contracts is one of the key parts of creating the Joint IT Single Service Provider-Pentagon (JISSPP), also known as Joint Services Pentagon or JSP. But in late November L-3 National Security Solutions announced that Army ITA had awarded them a five-year, $107 million contract to provide "next-generation information technology support for approximately 20,000 computing devices" for the agency.
On a media call between DoD CIO Terry Halvorsen and reporters in September, Barbara Hoffman, acting deputy director of the provisional JISSPP, said that the new joint agency reached initial operating capacity on July 20 and work was moving forward to merge contracts and services.
"We have been working on looking at contracts and contract consolidation, looking at how we can merge the two big previous service providers, ITA and EITSD, into a single organization," Hoffman said. "We are still working some of our initial service consolidations for [video teleconferencing], service desk and the [Computer Network Defense – Computer Network Defense Service Provider]. That is all moving along nicely and we are now entering in the phase of how do we start prepping for when we go [full operating capability], which is an undetermined time, but we do have to start thinking about that and planning for that."
That planning, of course, takes place as Pentagon IT requirements still remain and demand constant fulfillment. That's why Army ITA went forward with the new contract even as JSP officials are working to combine agreements and services, according to Pentagon officials.
"More than a year before the announcement of [JSP], [Army ITA] had undertaken an effort to consolidate the first two tiers of customer support – help desk and field service – into a single contract," said Lt. Col. Valerie Henderson, Pentagon spokeswoman. "This consolidation of contracts aligns with department efforts to improve efficiencies. The JSP would not have had a similar capability in place by September 2015, two months after its creation, so we proceeded with the legacy ITA contract award. JSP consolidation of legacy contracts is ongoing."
