ROCK ISLAND ARSENAL, Illinois (May 17, 2023) — A team from Army Contracting Command-Rock Island’s Information Technology Directorate supported a Department of the Army Office of the Chief Information Officer requirement to establish an enterprise agreement with Carahsoft Technology Corporation creating an indefinite delivery / indefinite quantity contract for ServiceNow Term Software Licensing.
The Army’s indefinite delivery / indefinite quantity contract base year was awarded on December 23, 2022, with a 5 year spend ceiling up to $431,999,156.
This enterprise agreement supports the Army’s Enterprise Service Management Platform in accordance with the Army digital transformation strategy, National Defense Authorization Act audit requirements, National Defense Strategy and the Army Unified Network Plan. These products will provide an Army-wide impact with large cost savings, updated security levels, as well as allowing more users to utilize the capabilities. Prior to the enterprise agreements, there were more than 30 disparate Army orders containing approximately 400,000 individual Army licenses in use, which provided no enterprise benefit.
Ashley Smith, contracting officer within ACC-RI’s Information Technology Directorate, said this enterprise agreement will allow for 1.2 million licenses for information technology asset management, software asset management, hardware asset management, IT operations management, and customer service management to be used across the Army to achieve visibility, transparency, asset and Information Technology management.
“This enterprise agreements consolidation of the existing licenses and purchase of additional licenses utilizes buying power to provide the Army with a discounted price and make the products and services available to all the Army. In addition, this enterprise agreement provides more than a dozen other optional ServiceNow products to commands on an as-needed basis available under the CHESS IT e-Mart website,” said Smith.
If the Army had failed to procure this enterprise agreement and consolidate individual contracts, the projected FY23 increase for these license types was more than $16.37 million for less than 100,000 licenses. Further, if the Army procured the same quantity and types of licenses, they procured under this enterprise agreement direct from the mandatory contract vehicle utilized prior to this enterprise agreement, the Army would have spent approximately $3.9 billion over a five-year course.
“Since the enterprise agreement’s value is $432 million over five-years, this is a $3.4 billion difference in Army spend,” said Smith. “Spending $3.9 billion is unaffordable to the Army and never could have been procured on an individual or command basis, leaving the Army unable to utilize the full benefits of the ServiceNow suite of products.”
Given the savings and capability this agreement provides to the Army, a main challenge was the timeline. The team was first made aware of the requirement in January 2022, and received the draft justification and approval in July 2022. The main contractor of the ServiceNow requirement wanted to have the acquisition awarded by September 2022, which wasn’t possible. Given the sole source nature of this procurement, the team worked closely with the contractor to start negotiating right away to ensure things went smoothly, including communicating with the contractor on the agreement of Army-centric terms and conditions. The team stuck closely to the previously agreed to milestones which had the award date set for July 2023.
“The contractor notified the Government team that the award must done by the end of calendar year 2022, otherwise the contractor was going to increase their prices beginning January 1, 2023,” said Smith.
Through successful team collaboration between all parties, the award was moved significantly ahead of the original milestone.
“It was a rush to get a justification and approval approved and go through the whole acquisition process in five months to satisfy Army needs and prevent further overspend,” said Smith. “We got everyone involved ahead of time, including the competition advocate.”
Smith also stated that they even had senior leadership from HQDA Office of the Chief Information Officer, Deputy Chief of Staff G-6 involved all the way up to the senior procurement executive from the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Acquisition, Logistics and Technology) to give them a heads up that this justification and approval was coming their way, so they knew why it was important and why they needed it reviewed quickly.
Smith said that as an everyday end-user, Soldiers and Army civilians won’t necessarily see or feel the impact of this award, but the requirement will heavily impact modernization of the Army Enterprise Service Desk, which most Army personnel have engaged with at least a couple times. The Army will also benefit from the software and hardware discovery and asset management capabilities, which will enable us to see what we own, and allow the Army to make meaningful IT business decisions to implement strategic digital transformation initiatives. As a main user of this product, the Army Enterprise Service Desk helpdesk will be able to track the hardware and software that all employees of the Army are utilizing, helping resolve technical issues faster.
“If you call in to the helpdesk, they are going to be able to track your computer and the different software that is on your computer,” said Smith. “ServiceNow will track current Army assets allowing the Army to see and achieve efficiencies enterprise wide.”
The team’s award of this enterprise agreement is a major step forward in helping support the Army of 2030’s digital and cyber modernization efforts across the networks, to protect and provide efficiencies for the Army’s current and future operations in a fiscally responsible manner.
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