Information systems or technology strategic review and planning services

Tender description

Wrexham County Borough Council currently maintains around 160 software applications which are used by the Council's business units to support both front and back office services. Applications are mainly supplied by commercial vendors (103) with in-house development accounting for the remaining systems. These are largely hosted in-house, across an estate of 200+ virtual and physical servers. As part of our ongoing Re-Shaping agenda and ICT Strategy, we are undertaking a programme to rationalise our business applications portfolio to meet future business requirements and deliver budgetary savings. We are now seeking bids from a suitable partner to assist us in the development and implementation of an Application Rationalisation Strategy. Wrexham County Borough Council currently maintains around 160 software applications which are used by the Council's business units to support both front and back office services. Applications are mainly supplied by commercial vendors (103) with in-house development accounting for the remaining systems. These are largely hosted in-house, across an estate of 200+ virtual and physical servers. As part of our ongoing Re-Shaping agenda and ICT Strategy, we are undertaking a programme to rationalise our business applications portfolio to meet future business requirements and deliver budgetary savings. We are now seeking bids from a suitable partner to assist us in the development and implementation of an Application Rationalisation Strategy. The work will be contracted in into 2 phases: Phase 1 will produce a high level overview assessing the application portfolio, outcomes from this work will include (but are not limited to): — Assessing the state, risk and technical viability of the council's current applications portfolio; — Working with business units to produce metrics on current application cost and value; — Identifying redundant and non-value adding applications which will free up budget and resources; — Identifying applications which duplicate core business functions and can be replaced or consolidated to free up budget and resources. Phase 2 will produce detailed plans for migrating applications, outcomes from this work will include (but are not limited to): — Producing a detailed migration plan for each application which will take on any opportunities to move to an off-site/cloud hosted infrastructure; — Identifying costs, benefits and associated risks for each application. Note, to inform bidders as to the nature of the application estate, schedule A of the tender pack provides details of the commercial application contracts in use by the Council and gives an internally assessed grading of each Application's potential for rationalisation.