The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) signed Blanket Purchase Agreements with BearingPoint [BE], EDS Corp. [EDS] and XTec Inc. allowing the firms to compete for task orders to help the department meet its requirements under HSPD-12 that all federal employees and contractors go through specified background checks and use biometric enabled credentials for access to government facilities and computer networks. The total potential value of the DHS program over five years is $180 million. There is no money attached to the initial agreements. Before it was ready to award the contracts DHS wanted to have a comprehensive cost assessment, wanted to make sure it had established the policies and procedures that could meet a baseline across the department, and we also developed a maturity model, a deployment plan for how we would reach that very last person in a remote location, and a migration strategy delineating how we might accomplish that,” Cynthia Sjoberg, DHS program manager for HSPD-12, tells TR2. “We wanted the process to drive the technology, not the other way around.” The first phase of the implementation is enrolling the DHS population in the National Capital Region, which will require building an enterprise infrastructure for deployment at department headquarters that will serve all components and directorates. DHS includes about 200,000 employees. Sjoberg says DHS does have plans for ensuring physical access with the secure identity cards that its employees will receive under HSPD-12. While it will take a while to change out older physical access systems that don’t meet HSPD-12 requirements, going forward every card reader DHS purchases will meet the requirements, she says. As for logical access, Sjoberg says DHS is working on plans to identify how that technology will be implemented.
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