Dorset County Council to outsource ICT technical resources in £100m tender

Framework will be open for collaboration and access by other public sector bodies

Dorset County Council is looking to outsource ICT technical resources in a framework agreement worth between £1m and £100m.

In The Official Journal of the European Union notice, the council states that it needs to source the resources externally when in-house IT services do not have the capacity or capability to carry out the necessary ICT-related work.

The purpose of the tender is to secure an EU-compliant framework for the procurement of external ICT technical resourcing and expertise for various IT disciplines, it said.

The council will need to call on these resources when it has inadequate capacity to carry out a development in a technology solution that is already in use, develop expertise in-house in new technologies in a timely way, or focus on strategy, roadmap and design.

It will also need the resources for "holistic expertise" on technology options for strategy and development, in-depth expertise in technology that IT services have not used before for which they can transfer their knowledge to in-house staff and the development of design and standards for the adoption of a new technology.

The contract is covered by the Government Procurement Agreement and is split into 19 lots. The lot titles are: application development, business intelligence, SAP HCM, SAP EICO, SAP BI/B, SAP PI/XI, SharePoint, Outlook/Office, frontline delivery, telephony and unified communications, remote access and security, internet services and quality of service, switching and routing, Wi-Fi services, monitoring and management of network infrastructure, virtualised infrastructure, storage and back-up, e-mail, Oracle services, SQL services, web services, desktop provisioning and management, security and access control in client devices infrastructure, mobile, architecture and strategy, project management and ITIL service management.

The contract is for an initial period of two years, commencing in May 2014, and the council can extend this for a further two years if it is satisfied with the provider's performance.

The framework will also be open for collaboration and access by other public sector bodies including councils, schools, universities, emergency services and NHS bodies, among others.

The estimated potential value of business in respect of Dorset County Council is £1m, but the local authority warned that it cannot guarantee that this value of business will be generated during the period of the framework.

When it takes into account interest from other public sector bodies and collaborative access, the estimated value for the entire duration of the framework ranges between £1m and £100m.