The U.S. Army plans to deploy a cloud-based recruitment platform under the second iteration of the Accessions Information Environment as part of a push to help the military branch’s recruiters generate leads in a mobile application, streamline the enlistment process and implement electronic check-ins for military trainees.
Col. Matthew Paul, project manager for Integrated Personnel and Pay System-Army, or IPPS-A, said in a statement published Wednesday the AIE 2.0 initiative includes implementing Agile best practices, adopting a new contracting strategy, advancing Salesforce out-of-the-box capabilities and promoting competition.
“We are maximizing commercial out-of-the-box solutions to the extent practical and trying to avoid one-off customizations wherever we can,” Paul said. “And when we do need to customize, we are going to do so smartly, deliberately and responsibly.”
According to Paul, the service branch has a direct contractual relationship with Salesforce and is transitioning to a multivendor environment and to an “Agile, continuous integration, continuous deployment methodology.”
Multiple-Award IDIQ Contract
In May, the Army Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems released a draft solicitation for a potential 10-year, $267 million multiple-award indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract to develop and sustain the cloud-based AIE platform.
“We are going to onboard multiple vendors that can meet our requirements, and those industry partners are going to compete at the task-order level,” Paul said.
According to the draft performance work statement, task areas include agile program management; Salesforce solution design, configuration, development and test; DevSecOps; architecture; training material development; and production operations transition.
The IPPS-A project manager noted that the service branch will act as a release train engineer to establish priorities and monitor the performance of vendors.
“We are not buying specific products,” Paul said. “We are buying capacity that is capable of going fast in a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe 6.0) model.”
The service expects the AIE platform to support more than 25,000 users at Army Cadet Command, Army National Guard and other components.