CDAO opens big door for small biz with $15 billion, 10-year Advana recompete

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s prized platform for big-data analytics, Advana, is about to become a high-stakes test case for the Defense Department’s ability to keep up with Silicon Valley.

After seven years of operating the platform through consummate DC consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton,  the DoD wants to open the “walled garden” of Advana to a wide array of vendors, including small businesses and “non-traditional” contractors with no experience running the maze of defense procurement. To make that happen, today the Chief Digital & AI Officer (CDAO) announced plans for a 15-year, multi-vendor contract worth up to $10 billion.

“One thing we want people to take away is you don’t have to do everything,” said Bonnie Evangelista, the deputy CDAO for acquisition, in a sidebar with select reporters at the Sept. 18 industry day for the new approach. “You don’t have to do every part of the tech stack … if you do a single piece and you do it really well, you can have a contract.”

Opening up Advana is a pillar of CDAO Radha Plumb’s yet-larger plan, called Open DAGIR, to overhaul Pentagon AI from the back office to the battlefield. The other pillar announced to date is a similarly ambitious opening-up of Palantir’s Maven Smart System, a AI toolkit in high demand by military planners at commands worldwide.

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While Maven ignited controversy early on over the use of AI for military targeting, Advana has quietly made itself essential. Originating as an obscure Pentagon comptroller project to help track financial transactions ahead of an audit, it proved capable of helping more and more officials manage more datasets for more missions. In 2021, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks issued a “data decree” memorandum [PDF] that declared “The Advancing Analytics (Advana) platform is the single enterprise authoritative data management and analytics platform for the Secretary of Defense” — and required specific approval before using any competing platform.

That official status means CDAO is tinkering with one of the most high-profile pieces of software in the Pentagon, one relied on daily by decisionmakers from the Secretary of Defense down. So any missteps on this new path will be very visible — but so were the growing pains of the existing system as Advana struggled to keep with rising demand.

The new approach, first described in detail today, calls for an Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite-Quantity (IDIQ) contract vehicle that can handle up to $15 billion in total awards. While the overall IDIQ will be in place for a decade, CDAO made clear today that there will be many opportunities along the way to bring in new vendors or kick out companies that no longer perform.

“There will be multiple awards,” Evangelista told reporters. “We are planning for on-ramping and off-ramping [vendors]  over the ten years, because technology change.”

How many companies does CDAO hope to bring on board? “I don’t know the right number,” Evangelista said frankly. “Part of today is to help us understand what is the right number.”

CDAO expects further rounds of back-and-forth with industry before it settles on specific contract language and technical standards, each of which is tricky enough to figure out on its own but which must also work together smoothly to allow multiple contractors to plug-and-play in the same system.

“This is the first industry day of this scale,” said Garrett Berntsen, the recently hired deputy CDAO for mission analytics. “We also have an RFI [Request For Information] that’s public that we’re seeking feedback on, [and] there will be additional future events.”

“You can’t just plop something this massive down,” Berntsen told reporters. “We’re getting lots of feedback.”