Accenture [ACN] has received a potential five-year, $250 million contract from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to consolidate enrollment services at the agency’s Office of Transportation Threat Assessment and Credentialing (TTAC).
Under the contract, Accenture will modernize TTAC’s security threat assessment infrastructure to handle an exploding number of vetting and credentialing activities, which was originally designed to support 2.5 million individuals per year and now stands at 12.5 million. TSA says that its serviced populations are expected to grow to 20 million individuals within the next two years and between 40 and 50 million within the next five years.
TTAC’s mission is to reduce the possibility of a successful terrorist attack or criminal act to the transportation system by applying threat assessment analysis to identify known or suspected terrorists. The office is the lead for conducting threat assessment and credentialing initiatives for travelers, transportation industry workers, and individuals seeking access to critical infrastructure.
In addition to the mounting demand for vetting and credentialing services, TTAC’s existing infrastructure consists of various stove-piped information processes and systems that need to be reengineered and integrated. This will require Accenture to consolidate multiple enrollment methods, implement identity management services across programs, standardize the approach for customer relationship management, standardize the physical and virtual credentialing processes, and the threat assessment processes.
In short, the TTAC Infrastructure Modernization program “will consolidate operations by integrating program-specific information technology systems and business processes into a common secure vetting, adjudication and credentialing architecture and fully integrated system,” according to TSA.
The information modernization that will be done by Accenture will have to be scalable to meet TTAC’s increasing demand. The system may eventually be required to support other Department of Homeland Security missions as well.