The U.S. Department of Agriculture, Rural Development has a continuing requirement for Application Sustainment Operations and Maintenance.

The USDA RD Technology Office under the guidance of the Assistant Chief Information Officer (ACIO) is responsible for developing, maintaining, and operating a portfolio of IT systems in support of RD’s core programs. These programs provide financial assistance in the form of guaranteed and direct loans and grants.

The systems inventory includes grant and loan intake, origination, servicing, and reporting applications and non-financial applications that support RD business and operational needs. Users of the RD systems include employees, private sector lending institutions, management agents, other mission areas or agencies and their finance offices, customers, potential customers, and the public. Each of these constituents has both common and unique information and support needs. Each of the agency program management constituents use both direct and guaranteed loans in the execution of their program activities. The financial systems have components which interface, exchange data, and use certain common processes. Our external constituents including lending institutions, management agents, customers, and potential customers have different informational and servicing needs than our internal constituents.

With mandated initiatives, our existing legacy components must be fully managed and/or enhanced to allow all constituents the necessary access to information and the functionality to implement our programs more efficiently. Once implemented these initiatives will:

· Improve the availability, accuracy, and timeliness of management information.

· Provide the servicing office with the capability to maintain and manage their guaranteed and direct loan portfolios.

· Improve our grant and loan programs to be more attractive to our lending institutions and potential customers.

· Facilitate continuous process improvements within the business and the automation development organizations.

· Enable agency management to proactively monitor and manage individual loans, program portfolios, and funding authorities. Provide agency management timely access to information required by Congress, Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Department of the Treasury, General Accounting Office, Office of Inspector General, and USDA.

• Focus Area 1:  Production Support Operations (PSO) (O&M) – support PSO by implementing, enforcing, and maintaining separation of duties between IT development and operational support efforts and keep RD applications running smoothly by providing infrastructure/platform support, monitoring/dashboard, analysis, incident management, change management, release management, and continual service improvements.
• Focus Area 2:  Sustainment Engineering Team (SE) Salesforce Applications (O&M) – sustaining lifecycle support of deployed/production applications/systems, covering everything from new feature requests, bug fixes, product improvements, vulnerability mitigation, application testing, integration services, application and security documentation management, and continual process improvements. Provide consistency in the way the product source code is developed, tested, and managed. Implementing best practices to streamline a DevOps model for lowering cost/price of operations and maintenance (O&M) across the RD system portfolio.
• Focus Area 3:  Sustainment Engineering Team (SE) Legacy Applications (O&M) – sustaining lifecycle support of deployed/production applications/systems, covering everything from new feature requests, bug fixes, product improvements, vulnerability mitigation, application testing, integration services, application and security documentation management, and continual process improvements. Provide consistency in the way the product source code is developed, tested, and managed. Implementing best practices to streamline a DevOps model for lowering cost/price of operations and maintenance (O&M) across the RD system portfolio.
• Focus Area 4:  System Development, Modernization, and Enhancement (DME) – legacy system enhancement or modernization planning, using an Agile approach to address complex IT objectives incrementally to increase the likelihood of achieving workable solutions for attainment of those objectives.