The US National Security Agency (NSA) has awarded a $2bn (£1.4bn)
outsourcing contract to vendor Computer Sciences (CSC) in a deal
expected to revitalise the intelligence agency's IT
infrastructure.
The 10-year contract, called Project Groundbreaker, is due to come
into effect in November. It is the result of a 15-month feasibility
study conducted to determine whether IT needs that are not central
to the NSA's intelligence activities could be met more efficiently
through a massive outsourcing agreement.
The deal is one of the largest government outsourcing moves to date
and is due to result in the transfer of at least 750 IT workers
from the Maryland-based NSA to CSC in California.
The NSA operates the world's largest pool of supercomputers as part
of its mission to intercept and analyse foreign electronic
communications. While analysts said Project Groundbreaker may
provide indirect benefits to the agency's espionage and
intelligence-processing capabilities, the outsourcing agreement
will primarily focus on filling gaps in day-to-day support
functions such as enterprise security and network management.
"The new contract should help the agency to upgrade its IT
infrastructure more quickly and allow it to focus more efficiently
on its core functions," said Steven Aftergood, an intelligence
analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. "The whole NSA
modernisation program is a work in progress."
For the NSA, Project Groundbreaker is more than just another
outsourcing deal. It is a key part of a major overhaul of the
agency that was kick-started two years ago by its reform-minded
leader, Michael Hayden. "In order to remain successful in our
foreign signals intelligence and information assurance missions, we
must immediately begin to invest in our IT infrastructure to secure
NSA's agility and adaptability in the Information Age," Hayden said
recently.
As part of the deal, the NSA will hand over responsibility for
design, implementation and management of its telephony, distributed
computing, enterprise management and network operations to the team
put together by CSC. A classified request for proposals was issued
in March to CSC's group and two others led by AT&T and OAO, an
IT services provider based in Maryland.
How CSC plans to handle the transition of NSA employees remains a
sensitive issue. Although details of the transition plan are being
put together by the agency, CSC spokesman James Sullivan said the
company has "clearly been incentivised by the NSA to do this
well".
At the announcement of the deal, the NSA characterised the
outsourcing contract as "an employee-friendly approach" that will
provide CSC and its partners with "monetary incentives to hire a
significant number of agency employees and offer them comparable or
better pay, benefits and opportunities". An NSA spokesman said that
more than the 750 workers due to transfer could shift to the
contractor workforce "voluntarily" if they wished.
But Olga Grkavac, executive vice-president of the enterprise
solutions division of the Information Technology Association of
America (ITAA), an industry trade group, said she had been told
that employees targeted for transfer to CSC could apply for other
available jobs within the NSA if they preferred to stay with the
agency. This was confirmed by an NSA spokesman, who said that no IT
workers at the agency would "lose their employment under the
Groundbeaker programme".
"It's not the technology, it's the cultural issues that are going
to be most difficult," said Chip Mather, senior vice-president at
Acquisition Solutions, a federal procurement consulting firm.
Contracts of the size of Project Groundbreaker "add such a degree
of complexity that they require extraordinary effort on top of all
of the cultural issues," he added.
For example, two years ago CSC managed an often-contentious
transition of more than 275 workers as part of the US Army's $6.8bn
Wholesale Logistics Modernisation Programme (WLMP). During the
contract negotiations, CSC was forced to deal with an array of
sensitive issues, including employee retirement benefits and
guarantees of continued employment.
John Garber, a former NSA official and now vice-president and chief
strategic officer at Cryptek Secure Communications LLC, said the
cultural issues that can affect "closed communities" such as the
NSA may create similar challenges for CSC in this case.
But CSC had managed the modernisation "very successfully," said
Mather. And the company has a 22-year working relationship with the
NSA in various capacities, most recently as the prime contractor
for a 1998 pilot programme called Project Breakthrough that
involved the outsourcing of 20 legacy software systems.