________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
standard federal procurement approach of technical evaluation, where they would judge the
three vendors and what they were going to do against the requirements. It involved both
headquarters and field people, a rather rigorous system where they would be graded out on
whether they fully met, partially met, or what in each of the categories of what we wanted.
The evaluation committee did the job on a raw score basis. There was no weighting to that,
although we had previously weighted various arenas as being more important. Over a rather
long period, the committee came up with a rather large volume of material, and it was pretty
impressive. You take a lot of experts, put them down to evaluate others, and they really come
to grips with things.
Then the advisory committee met. The advisory committee applies the weights and now
brings in the cost bids for the first time. You see, the evaluation folks never saw costs. Then
the advisory committee goes through a rather set routine also and comes up with a
recommendation to the source selection authority--which was me.
We went through that process, and I had the advisory committee report. I went through the
volumes of the evaluation board and the advisory committee and looked at all the factors. As
the name implies, I was the final authority for the selection of Control Data Corporation as
the winning vendor for that CEAP contract.
I thought that we had a good contract: eleven years of options, a minimum money guarantee.
That is, we only had to spend some .6 million or so to meet minimum requirements. I had
all the evaluation criteria, and they scored out very well compared to the others, in some
factors more than twice the others.
We had a good vendor and a good product in all three areas of hardware, communications,
and software, also good training, good administrative capability, and the flexibility of eleven
years of options, with the prices stated to buy certain things if we needed them.
Then there was to be a pilot test. Now, I sort of thought that was going to be the extent of my
major responsibilities--selecting this vendor and that was that, and we'd go about going
through pilot tests and then go about fielding it.
Congress and Bob Page, the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works, both had
misgivings on the size of the contract. There was congressional language that pretty well
said, "Okay, Corps, you can have your pilot tests and do it, but you don't need to spend more
than the pilot test until you come back and tell us what went on."
Then I was asked to go brief Bob Page on where we were out of the source selection, so I did.
I never had been made to understand how much he was against the CEAP program or his
strong personal feelings that we were embarked on the wrong path--too much big
computers, we didn't know what we were doing, we hadn't based the program on
requirements, and so forth. He felt the technical people were driving the train; that our
approach was to buy a computer, then figure out what to do with it. It costs way too much
money, and we were never going to be able to afford it. We didn't need it, and we were really
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