Army news service (July 8, 2005): Army awards new AKO contract.

FORT BELVOIR, Va. -- A contract valued at more than $152 million has been awarded to Lockheed Martin Corporation to manage Army Knowledge Online, the Army's enterprise Web portal.

Under the agreement, Computer Sciences Corporation and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) are major subcontractors with Lockheed Martin to help manage the AKO portal.

G-6 statistics indicate that AKO is logged onto more than a half million times daily by soldiers, Department of Army civilians, and others with sponsored accounts.

This past year, the Army's chief information officer/G-6, Lt. Gen. Steven Boutelle, directed two fundamental business process improvements for AKO.

As of June 1, responsibility for system development and oversight and for day-to-day management of AKO operations was moved from Network Enterprise Technology Command/9th Army Signal Command to Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems. PEO EIS. Officials said this move provides a better alignment of personnel and core competencies against organizational missions.

A universally secure, single point of entry for official Army business, available 24 X 7 worldwide, AKO uses the power of single sign-on and authentication capability to connect with knowledge, systems, and services. For the first time in the Army, AKO brings people, communities, systems, and applications together into one place, said Kevin Carroll, program executive officer for PEO EIS.

Second, the new contract gives the Army a single synergistic industry team to work with to optimally evolve and sustain AKO, PEO EIS officials said. They said the procurement also gives the Army a chance to have industry provide ideas on how to best evolve AKO with new capabilities.

Lockheed Martin will provide systems operations and maintenance, network communications, hardware and software integration, and 24/7 help desk support for both the unclassified and secure Army networks.

The award is for a base year with six option years and is a performance-based, fixed price, time and materials contract established by the Army Contracting Agency's Information Technology and Electronic Commerce Commercial Contracting Center, known as ITEC4.

Bryon Young, director of ITEC4, said he believes the AKO-EIS competition and resulting award "is an excellent example of the benefits that can be achieved through a performance-based acquisition strategy."

PEO EIS will have oversight of the new contract.

"Combining the great things that AKO has done in the past with the net-centric future that Army modularity will provide--this is a great opportunity for the Army," said Carroll from his Fort Belvoir office as the contract announcement was made.

"AKO prides itself in service to soldiers supporting Army operations around the world. Through the hard work of countless IT pioneers, AKO has steadily grown to a world class intranet service in a few short years, and our team looks forward to the continued evolution of technological advances to meet the needs of the Army active duty, Guard, Reserve, DA civilians, retirees, family members, and other users," said Greg Fritz, the acting director of AKO.

Gary Winkler, the Army's AKO user representative in the CIO/G6, said, "With AKO's industry team in place and its management shift to PEO EIS, we should be very effective and efficient at quickly infusing new capabilities for all Army users, building upon AKO's successes to date."