Solutions Solicitation: Intelligence Community (IC) Data Consortium (ICDC)

Description

***Amendment*** 4/23/25

Changes to this solicitation are in the "Key Dates" section on Pg. 9

Addtional updates include: Respondents shall submit the proposals electronically to dni-ot-2025@iarpa.gov by 12:00pm ET on 05/05/2025. See attachments for other key dates and information.

Federal Agency: Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)

Office: Office of the Open Source Intelligence Executive (OSIE)

On behalf of the OSIE (hereafter referred to as the Sponsor), prospective Respondents are hereby invited to submit solutions against the problem set for the ICDC effort. This is a solicitation that contemplates the award of Prototype Other Transaction (OT) Agreement(s). The Sponsor anticipates awarding an Other Transaction (OT) agreement to one or multiple Respondents under the authority described in 10 U.S.C. § 4022 as modified by 50 U.S.C. § 3024(n)(6).

Problems to Solve

The IC has a commercial data acquisition duplication problem and a costly commercial data replication and storage problem. The Government is seeking to award OTs to small businesses, nontraditional defense contractors, or traditional defense contractors if they propose significant involvement from a nontraditional contractor or provide a one-third cost share, with potential for follow-on sole-source sustainment contracts, to manage a commercial data consortium that unifies commercial data acquisition then enables IC users to access and interact with this commercial data in one place on unclassified systems while reducing data copying to classified computer systems. More simply, the Sponsor is seeking two broad skill sets to help solve the problems: 1) consortium data acquisition and management and 2) software creation.

Problem Background

The IC’s fragmented and decentralized acquisition model for Commercially Available Information (CAI) has resulted in siloed acquisitions of commercial data and platform licenses, duplicative purchases where vendors are often selling the same or similar data to many IC customers, bulk data ingest and replication, and limited data sharing. Efforts to partially improve this approach have resulted in exorbitantly priced enterprise contracts for commercial platform licenses that are rarely used. In addition, the phenomenon of vendors reselling the same or similar data while implementing unique techniques to aggregate data makes it difficult for the IC to determine the differentiated value offered by each vendor. The Sponsor seeks an approach based on repeatable data management plus civil liberties and privacy best practices to help streamline access to CAI for the entire IC and make it available to mission users in a more cohesive, efficient, and cost-effective manner by avoiding duplicative purchases, preventing sunk costs from unused licenses, and reducing overall data storage and compute costs.

The Sponsor seeks a centralized approach to access CAI via three primary options—API query, platform access, and bulk data access—from commercial vendors by establishing a government-funded Data Consortium, which will serve as a clearinghouse for IC data requirements, a single focal point in negotiations with vendors, a compliance vehicle to ensure the IC’s use of the data complies with IC guidance and owners’ terms and conditions, and a mechanism to pool agency funds to achieve economies of scale when pursuing access to targeted commercial data sets. The Sponsor then seeks a “zero copy” technical solution that prevents duplicative data purchases and reduces data replication and other cloud costs by keeping the data in place on the vendor’s IT to the maximum extent possible. This will be described in detail in Appendix A: Building the IC’s Data Consortium Interface at www.icdata.gov.

Consortium Structure, Tasks, and Vision

ODNI's OSINT Executive will serve as the program manager of the ICDC with direct oversight of the contract established with the Consortium Manager and the creation of the interface. The ICDC will be led by the Consortium Manager with support from the software creation team building the interface. The Consortium Manager will take unified commercial data requests from Government representatives and find the best data at the best price for the Government from data vendors in the Consortium (network of data suppliers). The Consortium Manager will also be tasked with managing the number of data vendors within the Consortium, socializing the Government’s data purchase goals, and ensuring efficient discovery and interaction with vendor-owned data and platforms within the government-hosted ICDC interface. Finally, the Consortium Manager will handle all contractual matters with data vendors on behalf of the Government.

The content above is only a summary. Please see attachments for full details about this OT.

Contact information

OSIE OT 2025

dni-ot-2025@iarpa.gov