TAC Talks

Host Chuck Ross is joined by a fantastic panel of VA Office of Information and Technology and TAC Contracting personnel who collectively have decades of experience. This panel includes:

Mr. Michael Ouslander, Product Line Manager for the Office of Information Technology, Development Security and Operations, Benefits and Memorial Services portfolio

Ms. Cara Varricchio, VA Technology Acquisition Center, Contracting Officer

What is TAC Talks?

Come for a peek behind the federal acquisition curtain as we gain insights from acquisition professionals at the US Department of Veterans Affairs and dissect varying relevant topics. In this five-episode series we will explore topics such as proposal evaluations, innovation, debriefs, and more!

TAC Talks is premiering Tuesday, September 29th!

The Department of Veterans Affairs does not endorse or officially sanction any entities that may be discussed in this podcast, nor any media, products or services they may provide.

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Chuck Ross: Welcome to the Technology Acquisition Center Podcast, which we affectionately call TAC Talks. Join us as we discuss highly relevant and compelling acquisition topics with highly esteemed industry professionals and attempt to share information with you, the 1102 workforce, program officials and our contractor friends. We hope that you find these topics and discussions helpful. So turn up the volume on your earbuds, and get ready for TAC Talks.
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Chuck Ross: Hello, podcast friends, and thank you for joining me today for our next episode of TAC Talks. My name is Chuck Ross, a Service Director at the Department of Veterans Affairs Technology Acquisition Center. We have another exciting episode for you today regarding the Veterans Legacy Memorial effort. The Veterans Legacy Memorial, or VLM for short, is an interactive online memorialization solution designed to honor the service and sacrifice of our nation�s Veterans. In February of 2019, the Technology Acquisition Center awarded the VLM task order to GovernmentCIO LLC. This award was made using the T4NG Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity contract as a 100% service-disabled Veteran-owned small business set-aside. Live demonstrations were utilized in lieu of written proposals during the evaluation process. VLM is a digital memorial space that allows visitors to honor, cherish, share, and pay their respects to the Veterans interred and inurned at VA National Cemeteries. The VLM platform aims to preserve the legacy of those Veterans by commemorating and sharing their stories. It also presents an academic opportunity, as it is designed to allow researchers, amateurs, students and professionals to share historical and educational information about Veterans and the cemeteries themselves, some of which date back to the Civil War.
(CR): I'm here today with VA employee Mr. Michael Ouslander. He is the product line manager for the Office of Information Technology, Development Security and Operations, Benefits and Memorial Services portfolio. I'm also here with Ms. Cara Varricchio, Contracting Officer at the VA Technology Acquisition Center. Thank you for joining me today. Mike, we will start with you. So if you could, could you just explain the Veterans Legacy Memorial in simple terms for our users to understand?
Michael Ouslander: Yes, so Veterans Legacy Memorial, or VLM as we call it, it's a VA hosted site that memorializes our Veterans and their service to our country. And it includes all Veterans that are interred and inurned in our national cemeteries. And then this year we also included Veterans that are interred or inurned at state, local, and tribal cemeteries.
(CR): And it's a public facing website that's secure and we have the link that we're going to put in the blog here for that is that correct?
(MO): That is correct, it's a public site. A lot of people will say that it's very similar to Facebook for our deceased Veterans. And openly available to anyone who wants to go to the site.
(CR): And what are some of the features that are available? I'm on the site now actually and it's very user friendly and it appears that there's a space for a picture, some tributes, things of that nature.
(MO): Yeah, there's actually a lot of ways to memorialize a Veteran. So you know, in addition to the date of birth and date of death, we also include the symbol of belief if the family chose one, the branch of service or even services that the Veteran served in and the corresponding war period or periods. We also link to the cemetery where they're located. The National Cemetery or state, federal or tribal cemetery where they've been laid to rest. We provide marker images, so we have a team that actually goes out and does a photo of the marker and that's presented on the site as well as geospatial coordinates, so they can be placed into something like Google Maps and you can actually see an aerial view of them. Then we also added things like memories, photos, historical documents, mementos. People could come in and comment on that person's life. You know Dad was a Veteran but here�s his family life after he left the military. Mom served in World War II and this is her legacy. Then we also just added something called word clouds, which is sort of a cool function and what it does is, it allows you to just put words that represent that person in sort of a floating cloud like image just to make the page more exciting and interesting.
(CR): It is interesting. So now, how does one get started? How does the Veteran get entered into the database? Does the VA do that? Or is it incumbent of one of their family members doing that?
(MO): So it's all automatic. Once our Veterans are laid to rest our backend systems will then populate the VLM database with their profile page and it will include all the data that we have on them and then it's then available to anyone who wants to go in and make comments or tributes, etc.
(CR): Ok. So if I'm a family member out there and you know, I just lost a loved one and I want to participate and add some comments what's the lead time there? When should I expect to see that record move over so that I can start sharing memories and adding photos and things?
(MO): It's usually about 24 hours from the interment date.
(CR): Wow, that's very quickly. Okay and if someone doesn't see something show up, there's a help desk, it looks like, and they can contact them and notify them and you guys work through the process?
(MO): Absolutely, we have a great help desk that's more than happy to help with any issues or concerns that you have as well as a lot of times people contact them to provide requests for new features, new functionality.
(CR): Very good, and it's not just for family members. I understand if someone served with someone that's out there and they remember serving with them. They can also go in and add content or an interesting story or some facts. Is that right?
(MO): Absolutely and historians, researchers can all go in. They could put information in. There may have been a photo that was part of a historical record that they want to attach to a Veteran�s profile and upload that image to that site.
(CR): And you have a number of fact checkers, I was told, that go through and look at the content, you know, there could be some things that are flagged as being maybe potentially inaccurate or didn't get verified and a research team that's part of your program office is that right?
(MO): Yeah, it's a contracted functionality and they monitor all of the content that's coming in to ensure that it's accurate and appropriate.
(CR): So now the Technology Acquisition Center. We are a contracting organization, so we always like to go into a little contracting spin on this and that's why we invited Cara to be here as well. And you worked with Cara, putting this contract in place. So Cara, we're going to turn our attention to you, and I was curious if you could just discuss a little bit of the evaluation process that was utilized for selecting the contractor that performs the service.
Cara Varricchio: Sure, so in thinking about the Veterans Legacy Memorial and how we wanted to evaluate it, we did live demonstrations with no written technical proposal. This allowed us as the government to get the user experience of the site by seeing it without reading it in a proposal so we were able to see it and use it like a family member would as if they were using the site. We also, as an evaluation criteria, required a help desk scenario played out live in front of us as part of the demonstration. We asked the offerors to verbally respond to a help desk scenario to demonstrate the overall demeanor of the help desk interaction between the family member or the loved one and the tech support person. By doing this we were able to see the level of compassion toward the family and friends calling in trying to use the site. This was so important for us because we wanted to see how offerors were going to make the families and friends and loved ones feel valued and show their appreciation of their loved one�s service to our country and that was really important to us and we were able to glean that through the demonstration and the help desk scenario.
(CR): Right, so the demonstration, much more valuable probably, Mike, for you to actually see the proposed solution as opposed to just reading about it in a formal technical volume of a proposal. So did that work well for you and your team?
(MO): Yeah, it worked really well, especially given the timeframe from the PWS creation through award to the expected delivery date. We needed a contractor to come in and really be able to demonstrate what we were looking for and needed and very, very quick turnaround time. So having those visuals helped us immensely.
(CR): Right, so you did have a very quick turnaround time I understand. Can you explain a little bit about the urgency with respect to this project?
(CV): So our biggest challenges that we faced when competing this had to do with time really. In 2008 in a Memorial Day Proclamation, The President threw out the idea or initiative for what�
(CR): 2018 I think was it, I think you said 2008 I just wanted to make sure.
(CV): Yes, sorry, 2018. The President highlighted an initiative in his 2018 Proclamation Memorial Day, an idea that eventually became VLM � about a digital memorial space that allows visitors to honor, cherish, and pay their respects to Veterans laid to rest at VA cemeteries. He also wanted a tool to allow researchers, students, and professionals to share historical information for educational purposes. So, eight months later the TAC received the request to put this on contract. We worked collaboratively with National Cemetery Administration, Office of Information Technology and Office of General Counsel in a lockdown scenario, where all the documentation was finalized real time. That's when we're all in a room to make sure all the documents get finalized in the fastest and best way possible. Because of everyone's efforts, the collaborative efforts between all organizations, we were able to draw up the documents, solicit, execute demonstrations and award by March 1, 2019. The PALT � their procurement acquisition lead time � is 24 business days from package receipt, which was about a quarter of the standard PALT time of our normal package process. So that was our main challenge getting it awarded by March 1st in order to roll out the site by Memorial Day, which is May 2019. The second challenge was having it operational, so due to the herculean efforts by the contractor and the government technical side going through compliance checks in the background, security discussions, availability of technical environments, all while the site was being created, allowed a successful launch by Memorial Day 2019 of the website.
(CR): It's great, so it's been operational since 2019. Mike, how many records do you have in there right now?
(MO): So with the addition of the state, tribal and federal cemeteries, we have greater than 4.2 million Veteran records in this site.
(CR): 4.2 million, wow, and I have enjoyed it. I went on the site and I kind of did some searching and there are some really cool stories that are out there that just bring these Veterans to life. You feel like you're kind of getting to know them. Do you have any that you can maybe share, just like a little snippet with our viewing audience of some of the things that they get posted?
(MO): Yeah, there's a lot of them, and a lot of them as you can imagine are emotional. There's a lot of stories of, you know, the family memorializing dad or mom for their service and you'll see photos of mom or dad or brother or sister with the kids or the grandkids. They're always very touching. You'll see stories of Veterans who reconnected through the site with someone they served with. As a matter of fact, we just had one story where they served during Vietnam, and they promised each other they would stay friends, and unfortunately one of them didn't return from Vietnam and the gentleman said that he had always made a promise that he would go visit this man's family in Puerto Rico, and it was 40 years later, and he finally was able to go to Puerto Rico, find the headstone of his friend who he hadn't seen in all those years, and felt guilty about. His family unfortunately was gone at that point, so it was a very emotional story, and we get a lot of those where it gives � it's not just memorializing but it's remembering. It's remembering, what I promised what I did, what I said, and all those things are where we really take advantage of the VLM site.
(CR): That's great. That is really heartwarming, and I would ask all of our listening audience. We do have the link in the blog here posted with this podcast and, you know, if you have some time take a little browse through some of these tributes and they really, they truly are remarkable and they are heartwarming. So Mike, what's in store for VLM in the future? Do you have any improvements, enhancements, that are in the works?
(MO): Yeah, we're not letting any grass grow under our feet. So, we are continuously making changes to the site to make it better. Recently, we did a full site redesign to optimize the site performance, to optimize the look and feel will continue to do that. We're adding the ability for users to use it more seamlessly on tablets and mobile devices. We've added, like I talked about earlier, we talked about the word clouds. We added that just recently. And the team has things that are going to be just be rolling out as recent as the next couple months, so it's not something that we're declaring it done and moving on. We're constantly making it better, and we will continue to do that for some time.
(CR): And the goal for VLM Next generation. I mean, if you could synopsize it, the main goal for this is to?
(MO): So when we started this our Under Secretary at the time had a statement that resonated with me and he said there there's a saying throughout the NCA that a Veteran dies two deaths, when they're laid to rest, and when the last person stops mentioning them. The goal of the VLM simply and purely is that we don't want a Veteran's memory to be lost forever. We want to memorialize them forever.
(CR): Wow, that is powerful, and I think the site is a true testament to the work that you guys have put into it and it really is something that is special, and I hope that if people are out there and they're listening to this, you go on to the site and if you have some interesting stories or if you want to post some pictures of your loved ones that you would do so because it really is a neat tribute to our Veterans. So I want to thank Mike and Cara for taking the time to be with us today here on TAC talks. I think that our listening audience will find value in hearing about the VLM program and I hope that this is a project that will continue to move forward and be a valued service to tributing our Veterans and also to providing some comfort to the family members that are still here and able to share their memories, so thank you, guys. I appreciate you being here.
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(CR): As always, we must remind you the Department of Veterans Affairs does not endorse or officially sanction any entities that may be discussed in this podcast, nor any media, products, or services that they may be providing. We thank you for listening to this episode of TAC Talks and hope you found it helpful as well as enjoyable. You may direct any questions or feedback to me, Chuck Ross at charles.ross@va.gov. And remember, if you are passionate about government acquisition, are a continuous learner and enjoy fruitful dialogue then keep tuning into TAC Talks.
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