Lifecycle Affordability
What It Costs to Build
Is Not What It Costs to Own
Most organizations know what it costs to award the project. Far fewer know what it will cost to operate, secure, staff, and sustain the result five years after turnover.
AIM is built to surface that gap — before the contract is signed, not after the system is deployed.
“A system can be affordable to procure
and still be unaffordable to maintain.”
Why This Happens
This is not a failure of contractor ethics. It is a structural misalignment between how contracts are written, how contractors are evaluated, and what customers actually need to make sound long-term decisions.
Contracts Reward Delivery
Firm-fixed-price and milestone-based contracts (common under FAR Part 16) define success as delivering the scoped capability — on time, within budget. Sustainment viability is rarely scored or enforced at award.
O&S Costs Are 70% of Lifecycle
In DoD programs, the Government Accountability Office has documented that operations and sustainment costs historically represent approximately 70% of total lifecycle cost — yet acquisition decisions are typically made on the build estimate alone.
FAR Requires It — But Lacks a Tool
FAR Part 7 requires acquisition plans to address life-cycle cost. OMB Circular A-11 requires agencies to account for total cost of ownership in capital planning. The obligation exists. The rigorous, defensible tool to satisfy it has not.
The Two Failure Modes This Creates
Mode 1 — Build and Move On
The contractor delivers the system to spec. The engagement closes. The customer discovers in Year 2 that sustaining the result requires additional FTEs, a growing cloud bill, software maintenance agreements, vendor support contracts, and recurring security compliance work — none of which was modeled at award.
A $10 million implementation becomes unaffordable on a $50,000 annual IT operations budget. The system atrophies. A new modernization program begins. The cycle repeats.
Mode 2 — Build and Lock In
The contractor designs the solution, retains institutional knowledge, controls data rights and integration documentation, and then positions as the natural — often only viable — bidder for the follow-on operations and maintenance contract.
The customer did not just get a system difficult to sustain. They inherited a vendor dependency they did not fully understand or negotiate at the time the architecture was chosen. This is more common than Mode 1 — and harder to escape.
How AIM Addresses the Gap
AIM does not replace the contractor. It gives the customer what the contractor has no structural incentive to provide: a rigorous, methodology-cited view of what the system will cost to operate, sustain, and own — before the decision is made.
3, 5, and 7-Year TCO Modeling
AIM's TCO Calculator projects total cost of ownership across multi-year horizons, covering IT labor (GS, SCA, and market rates), software licensing and maintenance renewals, cloud hosting and egress, hardware warranty and refresh cycles, integration maintenance labor, and compliance overhead. Not just what it costs to stand up — what it costs to keep running.
Phased IGCE with O&M Estimates
AIM's IGCE engine produces phased cost estimates — not just implementation, but operations and maintenance phases with parametric labor hour models and BOE narratives that cite OMB Circular A-11, GSA OASIS+, and BLS labor data. This satisfies the FAR Part 7 lifecycle cost planning requirement with methodology that can be audited and defended.
Vendor Lock-In Scoring
AIM's RAO scoring engine evaluates vendor lock-in as an explicit scoring dimension — weighted against your organization's constraints and data rights posture. Architectures that create downstream dependency are surfaced and scored before they are committed to, not after the contract closes.
Vendor-Neutral by Design
AIM receives no revenue from vendors and has no preferred stacks. Every technology recommendation is scored against your constraints without implementation revenue bias. This structurally prevents the conditions that enable lock-in — the architecture is chosen for the customer's 10-year operating reality, not the contractor's follow-on opportunity.
The Question Being Asked Is Different
Large Prime Contractors Answer
“Can we build this to spec?”
Optimized for delivery, schedule, and contract profit structure. The customer's 10-year operating reality is outside the scope of the engagement.
AIM Asks
“Should it be built this way — and can this organization actually sustain it?”
Optimized for the customer's long-term operational and financial reality, before any commitment is made.
What AIM Models Across the Full Lifecycle
Every cost category below is included in AIM's lifecycle cost output — with sector-specific rates, cited data sources, and confidence-level disclosures on every line item.
Implementation
- Engineering and integration labor
- Hardware acquisition
- Software licensing (initial)
- Cloud infrastructure setup
- Layer 1 physical infrastructure
Operations & Maintenance
- IT staff (FTE estimates by role)
- Software maintenance renewals
- Cloud hosting (with egress modeling)
- Hardware warranty and refresh cycles
- Security compliance overhead
Sustainment Risk
- Vendor lock-in exposure score
- End-of-life and EOL-risk flags
- FedRAMP / FISMA compliance gaps
- Data rights and portability assessment
- Follow-on contract dependency signals
Regulatory Grounding
Acquisition Planning
Requires acquisition plans to address life-cycle cost — defined as the total cost of acquiring, operating, supporting, and disposing of what is purchased. AIM's phased IGCE directly satisfies this requirement.
Capital Planning & Investment Control
Requires agencies to account for total cost of ownership in capital planning submissions. AIM produces the structured cost narrative and BOE documentation required to support an OMB A-11 compliant submission.
Documented Failure Pattern
GAO's annual High-Risk Series has repeatedly cited inadequate lifecycle cost modeling as a contributing factor in major IT program failures across federal agencies. AIM directly addresses this documented gap.
Related
Why This Matters
Documented cases of decision visibility failures in government and healthcare IT.
Read more
Cost Estimate Confidence
How AIM sources, validates, and discloses confidence for every cost estimate.
Read more
Decision Transparency
How AIM ensures every recommendation is traceable, auditable, and defensible.
Read more
See the Full Lifecycle Picture Before You Commit
AIM delivers vendor-agnostic lifecycle cost modeling, phased IGCE outputs, and procurement-ready documentation — before the decision is made, not after the system is deployed.
Or read the documented failure pattern this capability is built to interrupt.