DHS Wants to Hear from You

By Tomas O’Keefe, Consultant

Industry engagement seems to be the new focus at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as Luke McCormack, the chief information officer, and Soraya Correa, the chief procurement officer, have made it a point to ramp up outreach to the private sector. This summer looks to continue this trend of engagement with several activities and requests for information (RFI) that technology vendors will want to keep their eyes on.

First, the department has reached out to industry to gauge the viability of a DHS-specific contract for agile design and development. The RFI includes a draft scope of the proposed vehicle based on work done by the US Digital Services team in developing the Digital Services Playbook.

You can and should spend time familiarizing yourself with the concepts in the playbook, which largely revolves around open standards and open source. Position your products as enabling collaboration and identify how your products help an agency develop a modern technology stack. While the eventual contracts will likely be awarded to services companies, getting involved in the process should position technology suppliers and resellers to be a part of modernizing the DHS enterprise. The department is accepting responses through June 7^th.

Second, DHS is hosting a Cyber Security Industry Day in Arlington, VA, on June 9^th focused on research and development around mobile application security. The event is sponsored by the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA) Cyber Security Division (CSD) and is of interest to mobile security and mobile app security suppliers and their partners. The industry day is in support of a Broad Agency Announcement–a contract-like device that allows for funding of submitted proposals if the department is interested in what the vendor has to offer. That means there’s no guaranteed revenue source here, but if your R&D shop has been toying with new ways of protecting the integrity of mobile applications, this is another avenue to DHS.

If you’re looking for ways to better engage with DHS, reach out to your immixGroup account team and the Market Intelligence team.