Harrow Council on the hunt for ICT services in £100m tender

Vendor has to cover infrastructure, applications and service management

Harrow Council has issued a tender worth between £30m and £100m for the provision of ICT services.

The selected vendor will have to deliver an ICT service including infrastructure, applications, service transformation and service management to ITIL standards.

Further explanation in the Official Journal of the European Union notice states that the infrastructure includes the data centre, end user devices and service desk, networks and telephony, design and build.

Support, maintenance, development, integration and implementation of applications is also expected from the chosen supplier, as well as the knowledge and skills to enable the council to explore alternative technologies and ways of working in relation to its services.

The notice states that the ICT service shall:

• Be reliable, accessible, flexible and enable services to be continually improved
• Provide a balanced approach to cost and quality
• Deliver continual improvement and efficiency savings through use of current ICT approaches
• Provide continual value for money and validation against the market
• Be secure and compliant to appropriate standards including PSN, PCI-DSS and NHS IG Toolkit
• Deliver smooth mobilisation and transition of services.

The notice goes on to state that the council is seeking "appropriate levels of technical, financial and operational disaggregation to enable financial transparency and operational flexibility, such that the solution would be capable of transition to future procurement models that the council may adopt at the end of the contract".

The contract is for a five-year period with an option to extend up to a period of three years.