Page 169 - Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS)

154 AUTOMATED FINGERPRINT IDENTIFICATION SYSTEMS

There will be many benchmark challenges. Many of your unique, mandatory
requirements are not likely to be available at benchmark sites, such as local
interface protocols and systems or the latest ANSI/NIST implementation. Your
small test databases will not reflect the realities of error rates in large databases.
Since it is likely that not all of your required functionality will be available
in the COTS product to be benchmarked, you should consider that an 80%
(or some other less-than-100%) threshold be used for successful functionality
demonstration, as opposed to reliability and accuracy metrics.

7.5 ACQUISITION PHASE

For the acquisition phase, the basic questions in our decision tree revolve
around the following:

• What are the tasks for the vendor to perform?
• How will we specify them?
• What are the requirements for the system to be purchased?
• How will they be specified?
• What workflows need to be defined?
• How will we select the best value vendor?
• What will we tell the vendors to include in their proposals?
• Who will evaluate the proposals?

Like those of the pre-acquisition phase, the questions and answers of the
acquisition phase are very dependent on agency policy, procurement and
privacy laws, and overall priorities and strategies. The key stakeholders in-
clude contracts, finance, management, policy, users, legal, specialists, and the
vendors.
To document the decisions and the answers to our decision tree questions,
two major documents are prepared in the acquisition phase:

1. The source selection plan
2. The request for proposals (RFP), which consists of:
• Statement of work (SOW)
• Requirements specification
• Proposal preparation instructions
• Terms and conditions

In the following sections, the source selection plan, the SOW, and the require-
ments specification are addressed.