been busy with this new contract . . .
ARLINGTON, Va., September 5 , 2008 –The Business Transformation Agency (BTA) within the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has awarded Exalt Consulting Group a prime contract valued at $17.5 million for Independent Validation and Verification (IV&V) of products and deliverables. The effort is intended to assess conformance with established guidelines for transition planning, enterprise architecture, and solution development.
Exalt, a management consulting firm specializing in information technology (IT) strategy and enterprise architecture, won the indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract for a maximum of five years. Exalt has partnered with Capgemini Government Solutions LLC, which will provide IV&V implementation, and brings extensive experience with enterprise solutions with transformation initiatives, performance measurement and testing, quality assurance and IV&V around ERP implementations.
BTA’s mission is to guide the transformation of business operations to more agile practices throughout the DoD. The enormous scale of DoD – a $660 billion budget, 2.9 million people, and a supply chain of 5.2 million items – makes it the largest business operation in the United States. In its request for proposal, the agency said it expects that IV&V will guide the DoD toward greater efficiency because “IV&V is essential to ensuring the BTA delivers quality, effective solutions to the business challenges facing the DoD.”
A significant factor in winning this contract was Exalt’s unique BASSE™ IV&V methodology, which takes traditional IV&V that analyzes how efficiently software systems work, and expands that analysis to associated business systems. As a result, organizations can see the impact of software systems on the organization, the return on investment, productivity improvement, and any gaps with the planned targets.
“Our methodology was a clear differentiator in achieving this contract because it takes IV&V to the next level,” says Andrew Heifetz, partner and co-founder of Exalt. “By taking a top-down look at strategy and systems under development, and a bottom-up view of what elements are common and which can be changed across the DoD, we will provide BTA with measurements of key performance indicators around product quality, process improvement, organizational capability, and mission fulfillment.”
Federal mandates in recent years have made these assessments a requirement in order to avoid an IT landscape with duplication and gaps. The General Accounting Office’s Architecture Management Maturity Framework measures the capacity of an agency’s enterprise architecture program, while the Office of Management and Budget measures the program’s capability and compliance. The IV&V program at BTA will help comply with these complementary requirements, as well as help the agency meet its goal of transforming business operations throughout DoD and delivering enterprise-level capabilities that align to war-fighter needs.
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