Cis Case Study Gao

Computer Information Specialist, Inc.

B-293049; B-293049.2

January 23, 2004

National Library of Medicine/National Institutes of Health created a request for proposal (RFP) to acquire telecommunications support services at the agency’s Bethesda, Maryland campus. The RFP required prospects to meet the standards of the RFP such as providing more information and elaborating on their proposals, thus educating the requestor more on their level of experience and the capability of their staff, and approaches to provide privacy and security.

Computer Information Specialist, Inc. (CIS) maintains that the agency misevaluated proposals and made an unreasonable selection decision. The contract award was based on a “best value” basis, with several non-price factors, that were more important than price. The non-price criteria were graded out of 100 possible points. The criteria covered the capability of personnel who would work under the contract. Regarding pricing purposes offerors were to submit fully-loaded, fixed hourly rates for various labor categories. CIS competed against Open Technology Group, Inc. (OTG) to which the award was made. Once CIS filed the protest to the office it was found that both proposals were unreasonable.

Majority of the attention of the case is aimed at the narrative by the fifth evaluator, and the comments he made on CSI’s proposal. The other evaluators raised CIS score and determined that CIS’s proposal now met the personnel experience requirements. However the fifth evaluator scored CIS’s revised dramatically differently, reducing CIS’s score. The fifth evaluator prepared extensive narrative materials during his rescoring of the proposal. His comments were unedited and incorporated with limited comments from the other evaluators into the final consensus. There were no critical or independent analysis or evaluation of the proposals by the source selection official (SSO); instead it relies entirely upon the numeric scores for purposes of the...