THE PURPOSE OF THIS MODIFICATION IS TO UPDATE ITEM G. KEY PERSONNEL.

Investigators

Abstract

The purpose of this task order is to acquire software sustainment, operations and maintenance support for systems within the ITAC application portfolio, including several critical applications utilized across National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHBLI) and National Institutes of Health (NIH). The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) maintains an application portfolio that supports audiences both internal and external to the NHLBI. It is of significant importance for the Information Technology and Applications Center (ITAC) to keep all applications up-to-date, secure, and bug-free. This involves updates to content, structure, code, and graphics. Unlike software development which is driven by new functional requirements, sustainment is driven primarily by non-functional requirements. These changes may be changes in the environment in which the software operates, and the software may need to be modified to continue operating as originally designed. One case of this is the result of the hardware and software end of life policy that states that no hardware or software can remain in production without vendor support, or in the case of open source software, community support. Here the software may need to be updated in order to continue operation without regression. At a minimum this would require rigorous testing to ensure no regression, at the most complex it may require updating code to use new versions of libraries or in some cases to replace supporting software and libraries with alternatives. In other cases sustainment may involve making updates to backend databases either directly or through custom tools. Managing users and roles, updating reference data and validating and fixing data loads all fall into this category. Additionally the sustainment team will be expected to validate software that transitions into the sustainment portfolio from all ITAC development contracts and escalate to the government any deficiencies in code and suggests potential remediations. Finally, the software portfolio must maintain the appropriate security documentation to ensure the relevant Authorities to Operate (ATO) remain valid and in compliance with policy, standards and regulations. The NHLBI categorizes these sustainment activities into the categories which include (but is not limited to): • Corrective Maintenance • Adaptive Maintenance • Preventative Maintenance • Application Operations Support • Transition Support • System Assessment and Authorization To maintain a dependable and well-functioning IT maintenance support environment, it is important that resources are ready and available to support outages, emergencies, and application deployments, as necessary. Resolving outages, emergencies, and application deployments may require 24 x 7 support, which would entail having resources available beyond typical business hours during the week and on weekends. The government intends the Sustainment contractor to provide an evaluation of software applications in the Sustainment portfolio to include but not limited to assessment of performance, code quality and security. This role will be particularly critical as software transitions from active development into the sustainment portfolio and the software must be evaluated against a set of acceptance criteria. Therefore, the sustainment functions requires separation from the development teams and appropriate checks and balances to ensure the integrity of the process.