National Interagency Fire Center, Bureau of Land Management, 3833 South Development Avenue, Boise, Idaho 83705-5354

70 -- CASE TOOL REQUEST FOR INFORMATION Due 060796. Contact Judy Crosby, 208-387-5481. The National Wildfire Coordination Group (NWCG) is an organization comprised of representatives from various Federal, state, and local wildland fire agencies. NWCG has appointed a team to look into the various commercial off-the-shelf CASE tools to support strategic and operational software development activities sponsored by NWCG. Over the past year, NWCG developed enterprise process and data models to identify the high-level business requirements of the interagency wildfire community. It is our intention to utilize a CASE tool to support the use of these models as the foundation for future application development. The CASE tool will be used to support planning, analysis, design, construction, testing, and software deployment. We wish to solicit preliminary comments, suggestions, and information for use in identifying existing off-the-shelf products that may be of use. Specific objectives are to: (a) determine the feasibility of implementing a CASE tool from a vendor perspective; (b) solicit comments and information about existing products that support the automated system development process; and (c) ensure that the agencies's expectations for capabilities are realistic, reflect the state-of-the-art, encourage free and open competition, and secure the most cost effective solution. Elaborate or expensive responses to this request for information are not required or desired. There is a questionnaire available for vendors to provide information. The items on the questionnaire should be addressed by indicating a ``yes'' or ``no'' answer in the left column, where appropriate. In addition, each item should include comments to further support your answer. Marketing brochures, product reviews, demonstration software, specification sheets, technical manuals, video tapes, and/or other available materials describing the products and services would also be helpful to us. Clear, concise materials, relevant to the main issues, will enable us to do a more careful review and analysis. A metric will be used for the objective evaluation of products with respect to two classes of requirements: mandatory and optional. The metric comprises weighting factors, ratings, and an algorithm used to rank evaluated products. Applying this metric will rank the product features in such a way that a subset of features can be identified as the most desirable for fulfilling the identified need. The order of the items on the questionnaire has no relationship to the importance of the features. This is a request for free and open information only. Nothing received or discussed shall result in commitments between the issuing agencies and vendors. We are currently considering the feasibility, requirements, and design features of CASE tools and may determine that an interagency CASE tool is not feasible or too costly to implement. The responses will be considered a sharing of open market information and not a binding offer to supply or implement any products or services. We request that no proprietary information by submitted. All material should be non-confidential and unrestricted. We reserve the right to incorporate any concepts and ideas from the responses into any subsequent request for proposals or other government procurement documents. We request that the responses be received no later than June 7, 1996. Individual meetings with vendors will not be scheduled at this time. An electronic copy of the questionnaire can be obtained by requesting a copy from Judy Crosby via Internet: Judy Crosby@nifc.blm.gov. or via telephone: (208) 387-5481. Questions may be addressed by calling Diana Grayson at (208) 387-5633. Responses should be addressed and delivered to: National Interagency Fire Center, National Systems Support Group, Attn: Judy Crosby, 3833 South Development Avenue, Boise, Idaho 83705-5354. (134)

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