Although CBP will pass over current SBInet contract for northern border, SBI chief anticipates exercising additional years on it
When establishing its next major border security projects along the US northern border, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not intend to use its virtual fence contract with the Boeing Co., confirmed the head of the program in an interview with Homeland Security Today.
DHS contracted Boeing to place cameras along the US northern border in areas near Detroit, Mich., and Buffalo, NY, in 2009 using its contract for the Secure Border Initiative-Network (SBInet), but the department would not do so for follow-on activities scheduled to begin as early as 2010, SBI Executive Director Mark Borkowski said.
Borkowski, who faulted the structure of the SBInet contract in a hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee Sept. 17, praised the contract for its indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity feature, which permits US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to buy as much or as little from the contract as it likes.
"Having it available doesn't necessarily mean I have to ask for any work from Boeing. It's not a bad idea to have this contract available and then make independent decisions each time I want to do new work. I have the option of using this contract for the new work but I also have the option of going somewhere else," Borkowski commented.
Although the work along the US northern border is still in the planning phases, Borkowski anticipated that CBP would hold competitions for contracts to handle those projects.
Boeing received the work to place cameras near the Saint Clair River in Michigan and the Niagra River in New York because it had the capability to pull those projects together efficiently and effectively, thereby saving DHS money, Borkowski commented.
But DHS plans to build a facility called an operational integration center near Detroit. The center would house local, state, and federal agencies along with Canadian agencies to work together on border security using data and feeds from the various sensors along the US northern border, Borkowski described.
Those sensors would include air and marine sensors and Coast Guard sensors as well as the cameras on the rivers, he added.
"Agencies could then start to experiment with working together as a team. We are still fleshing out the details of that but we expect a good deal of the work to support that will be competitive," Borkowski revealed.
"We are already starting the construction activity. The follow-on activity will include the work to actually figure out what sensors we put in and whether we buy new sensors and from whom do we buy them," he added. "So you'll see that in 2010 and into 2011 a little bit."
Borkowski also anticipated exercising the two remaining option years on the Boeing contract in the future, assuming no major problems develop, despite the fact that he believes it could have a better structure.
The SBInet contract is difficult to manage because it presumes that DHS has the program management capacity to serve as a lead systems integrator (LSI), which it does not, Borkowski said.
"In our case, the problem with that is here at the Department of Homeland Security, we are still building our program management competency. In order for an LSI construct to work, the government program team has to be very strong and it has to be very complete. I still have significant vacancies in my program office. I still have significant skills and gaps in the competencies and the types of people that I need to manage it. The fact of the matter is that we are simply not in a position yet to manage an LSI contract," Borkowski explained.
"But, that's hindsight. Certainly, if we were in a position to do that, this would be a whole different story," he said.
No surprises
Stewart Baker, former DHS assistant secretary for policy, was not surprised that DHS would use a different contract for northern border security efforts than it has for the southern border.
"It is a different set of problems, so I wouldn't necessarily expect exactly the same solution or the same contractor necessarily," Baker told Homeland Security Today. "When you are working in such a different environment, so far from the other deployment, it's entirely reasonable for the government to take a different contract vehicle for that kind of deployment."
Greg Rothwell, formerly the top DHS procurement official, agreed that using contracts other than the current SBInet contract held by Boeing would be a prerogative of the federal government. Doing so does not reflect poorly on DHS, Boeing or SBInet, Rothwell told Homeland Security Today.
Rothwell did not believe, however, that the contract structure of SBInet would impede the long-term success of the project.
"You should be able to make a contract structure work successfully to meet your goals," Rothwell stated. "Regardless of the contract, you will always face challenges involved with changing technology or incompatible designs. A federal contract vehicle, regardless of its structure, serves as the means to meet the goals and outcomes as stated by the program management office."
With SBInet, for example, the Project-28 surveillance and communications prototype did not work as well as officials had hoped. Although DHS and Boeing had to go back to the drawing board to develop a new system, such developments should not come as a surprise to anyone working on a large-scale technology program with a lot of interconnecting pieces, Rothwell noted.
The structure of a federal contract wouldn't have an effect on those requirements, remarked Rothwell, now head of the consulting firm The Evermay Consulting Group Inc. In addition, federal procurement offices could change the structure of a contract at any time through a modification to it.
Ultimately, Rothwell said, it's up to a federal agency to decide how to structure contracts to meet the goals of its program-whether using one large contract or several smaller ones.
But he agreed with the assessment that DHS lacks the program management capacity to serve as a lead systems integrator on large projects such as SBInet.
"The department has a long way to go before it's mature enough to field the competencies required to serve as a lead systems integrator on a large-scale acquisition of that nature," Rothwell said. "But then, few civilian agencies do have that capability. The Department of Defense has the most experience in all of government running those kinds of programs and they still run into trouble managing them from time to time."
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