The Department of Homeland Security is almost done with the first phase of a project that will allow federal agencies to use artificial intelligence for a task that can be overwhelming for humans: extracting, analyzing and visualizing the underutilized data in the governmentwide system for contractor past-performance records.
Next week DHS will finish reviewing services from nine vendors who were given data sets from the Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System (CPARS). Before awarding contracts worth more than $250,000, agencies review historical data in the CPARS to see how offerers acted under previous agreements. It’s not an easy task.
With more than 1 million records covering 60,000 contractors, CPARS can bog down contracting officers, said Polly Hall, acquisition innovation advocate director of the Procurement Innovation Lab at DHS. They can sort records by contract value, Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) number or performance period, but even once those filters are applied, the results frequently still number in the hundreds and can only be viewed PDF at a time.
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