DISA awards $49M OTA for new background investigation case management system

By Justin Doubleday / July 9, 2018 at 3:54 PM

The Defense Information Systems Agency announced today it has awarded an other transaction agreement to prototype a case management platform for the National Background Investigations System.

DISA awarded the $49 million OTA to Herndon, VA-based Enterprise, LLC on June 22, according to an agency statement. The company is tasked with developing a prototype of the National Background Investigation Services (NBIS) Investigation Management (IM) shared service, DISA said.

"The NBIS IM platform is the integrated case management solution that will bring together the core functions of the systems and provide the interface for investigative users," the statement continues. "The system will expedite the time to process investigations by automating and optimizing key processes from request initiation through investigation completion."

Enterprise, LLC is partnered with Pegasystems, Inc. of Cambridge, MA; Accenture Federal Services, LLC of Arlington, VA; Torch Research LLC of Leawood, KS; and Next Tier Concepts, Inc. of Vienna, VA on the prototype project, according to DISA.

In 2016, the Obama administration tasked the Defense Department with developing a new background investigations system in the wake of a damaging hack into the Office of Personnel Management's legacy system that exposed the records of as many as four million individuals.

The Fiscal Year 2018 National Defense Authorization Act approved the transfer of the background investigations function from OPM to DOD's Defense Security Service for military-specific investigations. The Pentagon plans to rely on automated record checks and other "continuous evaluation" technologies to accelerate the investigative process and reduce the backlog of delayed investigations.

Meanwhile, the White House's government reform plan released last month proposes shifting the entire background investigations process to DOD, since military-specific cases make up 70 percent of the federal government's background investigations workload already.

However, DOD has yet to task a senior leader with overseeing the transfer of the background investigations mission to the department.

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