COs, CORs, and other contracting experts as the hero

Several years ago, law enforcement faced a tough realization.  They realized that a large majority of criminals had a long track record before they were arrested on major crimes involving police, especially situations where no convictions took place.  Whenever police look into situations, they complete an incident report detailing their inquires, examinations, and analysis about individuals.  Only 70% of incident reports don’t involve convictions.  Unfortunately most incident reports prepared by state, county, and local jurisdictions aren’t automated.  Even those that are, don’t follow any set format for IT searching.  The FBI found most incident reports were unknown outside the preparers own organization.  In addition, a lot of other pertinent formation exists which isn’t captured in a useable way on a national centralized basis.

The FBI initiated a project to gather all this information in the various forms that existed and establish a means to analyze.  Their PM, COR, and CO decided to see how other organizations over the world handled similar things.  They spent a long time conducting market research.  Because potential solutions varied significantly and they couldn’t decide on a single process to adopt, they decided to use a SOO based approach and compete solutions.  Offerers submitted proposals which were evaluated.  The most promising were chosen to provide details on their ideas as present demos on whatever portions of their solutions currently existed.  Each company was challenged by government technical experts on their viability and respective risks.  One was chosen for the development contract and it was a huge success.

https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/featured-articles/the-national-data-exchange-n-dex-a-leader-in-information-sharing

Nice. I can only imagine how many criminal cases were solved as a result of this project! Using an SOO led to a better product than a more prescriptive approach would have. The trade off was, what, more time to evaluate and compare the proposed solutions?

I think the entire evaluation process took 3.5 months from proposal receipt to award.