Air Force Agile Pilot Program meets contracting needs in the wake of Hurricane Michael

  • Published
  • By Brian Brackens
  • Air Force Life Cycle Management Center Public Affairs
The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center’s Business and Enterprise Systems Directorate’s Agile Pilot Program is consolidating four legacy contract writing systems into a single contract management system known as Contracting Information Technology, or CON-IT. It is currently rolling out Air Force wide.

The new system is an improvement on the legacy contracting systems, and will be used by thousands of contracting professionals, managing every contract in the Air Force, in support of every Air Force mission.

“CON-IT is modernizing the contracting enterprise,” said Mike Allen, Program Manager responsible for CON-IT. “We’ve fully adopted agile development and deployment alongside our United States Department of Agriculture and Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition Contracting partners. CON-IT allows for audit transparency and is built on a modernized technical platform that resides in the cloud. CON-IT is faster and cheaper to maintain than legacy systems that are antiquated and have been mandated to retire. Our users are involved throughout development and deployment and the feedback we’ve gotten so far has been exceptional.”

In the wake of Hurricane Michael, the CON-IT integrated program office and the Civil Air Patrol provided real- time support to relief efforts at Tyndall Air Force Base, Fla.

“After Hurricane Michael tore through Tyndall AFB, the contracting community was simply unable to accomplish the mission because their legacy contract writing system was not available,” Allen said. “Our integrated program office pulled in Tyndall’s contracting user accounts, activated them in CON-IT, and quickly provided training to get users familiarized with the system. Without CON-IT they [Tyndall contracting officers] would not be able to generate contracts to purchase items needed for day-to-day base operations. We couldn’t have done it without the help of the Civil Air Patrol. They were on the ground in Tyndall to pick up and fly servers to Maxwell AFB where we loaded Tyndall’s contract data into CON-IT. Users are operational, and back on mission, thanks to their support.”

CON-IT will deploy to over 4,500 operational contracting users by December 2019. CON-IT is helping lead the way in support of Air Force leadership’s commitment to agile development and deployment by providing much needed capability at the speed of relevance.