A service to efficiently manage information requests; from submission to publication.

Tender description

Summary of the work Discovery and prototyping for a digital service to manage submission of clear and valid information requests, and back office workflow to enable tracking and management of requests including reporting, and subsequent publishing of non-personal requests. Solution to be compliant with current legislation, and pre-empt upcoming changes (GDPR). Latest start date Tuesday 1 August 2017 Why the Work is Being Done Hackney Council receive c.1800 Freedom of Information and Environmental Information Requests per year. These need to be responded to within 20 working days of receiving a valid request. The Council receives c.150 Subject Access Requests which need to be defined, verified, collated, redacted and released within 40 calendar days (30 days from May 2018) of receiving a valid request and ID. This work is being done to improve efficiency in the back office processes to improve our level of compliance, and the quality of the information service provided to our residents and the public at large. Problem to Be Solved Requests are managed on two systems - neither manage the whole process. Requesters must specify which type of request they are submitting. Requests subject to both DPA and FOI are harder to manage. Requesters are given no assistance in compiling a clear and valid request - this would increase the quality of response and streamline processes. We do not publish FOI responses; this would increase transparency and may reduce volume of requests. Requests that span Council services cannot be tracked and collated easily. Reporting requires manual effort. There are software limitations - deadline calculation and ability to stop the clock. Who Are the Users As a member of the public I want to be provided with all of the information that I want or need so that I can satisfy my query. As a director I need to review and approve responses containing information relating to my business area so that I can ensure they are correct and of the right quality. As a champion I need to see all requests that require my input and their status , so that I can prioritise them and collate the information on time. Work Already Done A project manager is in place and some initial discovery has begun, with as-is and to-be workshops coming up over the next month. Existing Team The team consists of one project manager. The information management team are available as subject matter experts but are not dedicated to the project. Current Phase Discovery Skills & Experience • Have experience of working to the user-centred, Agile approaches set out in the Government Digital Service manual • Blend multi-disciplinary skills, including user research, service design, front-end development and business analysis • Be able to provide examples of similar projects where they've produced a user portal with back office workflow. • Have some knowledge of user needs, and information legislation • Be willing for their work to be assessed publicly against the local government digital service standard • Have experience of introducing Lean business process mapping • Work openly and iteratively with the project team and be prepared to talk about its work • Support the team in learning user-centred, Agile approaches Nice to Haves • Be prepared to share risk and/or reward with the Council if the service is attractive to other authorities • Transfer knowledge to help the onward development of the service • Challenge the emerging Hackney Agile Lifecycle to show how we can better develop user-centred services incrementally Work Location The supplier can alternate between Council offices in Mare Street, London E8 and its own office (if relevant). Working Arrangments The supplier can alternate between Council offices in Mare Street, London E8 and its own office (if relevant). No. of Suppliers to Evaluate 3 Proposal Criteria • How the proposed methods supports our goal • Team structure, including skills, experiences and relevance of individuals • Experience of the method of working from previous projects • How they’ve identified risks and dependencies and offered approaches to manage them • Estimated timeframes for the work Cultural Fit Criteria • Work openly and iteratively with the project team and be prepared to talk about its work • Support the team in learning user-centred, Agile approaches • Transfer knowledge to help the onward development of the service Payment Approach Capped time and materials Evaluation Weighting Technical competence 60% Cultural fit 10% Price 30% Questions from Suppliers 1. What is the budget for Discovery & prototyping, and has this budget been formally confirmed? We have not yet set a budget because of the range of responses we might receive. It will be funded from a central source of funds made available to help us meet the requirements of GDPR. 2. What are the next stages after 3x suppliers are shortlisted? The shortlisted providers will be invited to submit a document outlining their proposed approach to the work, the skills and experiences of the people involved and the costs of the project. In the event of two highly scoring tenders, we may invite providers to a face to face meeting. The highest-scoring tender will then be awarded the contract. 3. What are you target live dates, and what are they anchored to? No particular target live date given the early stage of the project. However, the introduction of general data protection regulations in May 2018 provides a focal point for improving the way we manage requests for information. 4. What are the two solutions you currently have in place, and why not simply look to extend the functionalities of either to fulfill your ultimate requirements from this project? We currently use Covalent for our FOI requests, integrated with OpenText eDOCS which is our corporate document repository. We use our CRM for SAR request tracking. We want all information requests to be managed on one platform, and to manage them end to end. 5. Has pre-work been undertaken with the suppliers of your existing to solutions, or other suppliers? No 6. How does this solution fit into the broader objectives of London Borough of Hackney for 2017/18? We are preparing for the General Data Protection Regulation which will bring SAR response time down to 30 days. We want to streamline processes for both FOI and SAR to enable us to meet this as well as improving transparency. 7. Is the expectation that this discovery and prototyping phase result in the procurement of a new solution? The discovery and prototyping may lead either to procurement of an off-the-shelf solution or a custom solution, depending on the findings of the research. 8. Will the selected supplier for these phases be expected to be the supplier of the final scoped solution? No. Any additional work would be subject to a separate procurement exercise. 9. For the question 'be prepared to share risk and/or reward with the Council if the service is attractive to other authorities' are you looking for the supplier to provide an example of a potential commercial model for any future authorities to take up? We are looking for suppliers that have experience of arrangements where they either offer a discount on the initial investment against their future exploitation of the intellectual property, or a reward-sharing agreement with the client for any future exploitation of the intellectual property. 10. Your question on risk and reward - is there a context behind this that we should be aware of? No additional context to the answer above. 11. Finally, the deadline for asking questions is the 12th of July, and the portal specified that answers will be posted by the 18th of July (one day before submission is due). Is there a way to fast track response so that we may bear answers in mind when responding? We will respond to questions as soon as we can - preferably on the next working day. 12. What systems do you currently use? We use Covalent for our FOI requests and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 for our SAR requests. Documents are held in a separate system, OpenText eDOCS which integrates with Covalent to provide a link to the associated documentation. 13. Are you looking to migrate information from current systems or have a fresh start? We will consider both options - migrating open requests or dual running to have a fresh start in a new system. 14. How many users are expected to work through this solution, what proportions will need read-only, read-write, etc. access? Our estimate is 150 - 200 internal users. Their use of the system will depend on the functionality - for example approval is currently done outside of the system on the associated documents. There are 3500 staff that could all potentially provide information to feed into a response. The public will need to be able to log requests and any follow up information such as ID for an SAR. 15. Are you looking for Discovery and Alpha at this stage; UX and prototype of new system? We are looking for discovery and prototype at this stage. 16. Have the workshops started and has any other work been done to date? Workshops started on Friday with internal FOI stakeholders. We have also explored some more complex requests such as those that involve multiple services and how to meet these in time frame. Link to summary of workshop here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xPiQSv0fWZ2pzRySo9fqOKn-F9Im3BnBxZEi8y1baTM/edit?usp=sharing 17. What budget and timescales are being considered; is there more information already published? Discovery is already underway. We have put a start date of 1st August, whilst there may be some flexibility here we need to ensure we can align with project resource for discovery work. The way it has gone out to market dictates timescales - this is for the developer to specify in their proposal. We are looking to have something in place in the autumn. There is no specific budget due to the range of proposals we may recieve. 18. Are there any points of integration with other systems that you already use? We have an integration between Covalent and OpenText eDOCs for FOI. This is not something that we are specifying needs to be included in a new solution but if it will hold documents it needs to be in line with the correct handling of personal sensitive information because of the Subject Access Requests. We would like the system to have an API that is easy to use so that we can have the potential to use it if we want to. 19. Are there any preferences in technologies that you already have expertise of? No 20. Are there any technologies you are using that you want to continue using? We have an open mind at this stage. 21. Are there any policies such as no open source technology, in place? Yes - we have adopted the Local Government Digital Service Standard which commits us to using open standards and open source where possible. 22. There has been collaboration with Oxford, are there additional requirements that need to be considered? Hackney have worked with Oxford on the requirements due to their previous experience of developing a solution. Now this has opened up to SARs and has the publishing aspect too it is of more interest to Oxford but their requirements are standard - handling requests end to end. 23. Is there anything specific to the processes used in-house by Hackney for these type of requests? For FOI - as we handle 1800 requests per year and the business areas have the information and expertise of where the information resides, we have a model of champions. We receive and assign the requests and the business areas collate the information, and we are then responsible for sending the response out. We co-ordinate the process. The back end process is managing that back and forth and ensuring that we can have oversight. We wouldn't expect it would be very different in other local authorities handling FOI requests. 24. You want submissions by 19th July and want someone to start by the 1st August. Is the next step of the process and face to face conversation or meet up; what is the next step beyond submission? In the event of two highly scoring tenders, we may invite providers to a face to face meeting, but would consider making use of video call technology for this. 25. Is it an off the shelf package you are looking for or a solution bespoke to Hackney that would be useful elsewhere? We are open to either option as long as it meets our requirements. We are not specifying that it should not be off the shelf. 26. Any idea of numbers of users in Hackney that would need to access the system? It is champions, approvers and the governance team. Our estimate is 150-200. Their use of the system will depend on the functionality - for example approval is currently done outside of the system on the associated documents. There are 3500 staff that could all potentially provide information to feed into a response. With SAR there are very few people accessing these outside of the team, but this needs to be possible because of working with social care for those for care leavers. 27. Would a search facility be useful when someone is making a request? It may be - but we want to take an approach rooted in user need to ensure we invest in the solutions that deliver the maximum possible benefit. 28. Do you have any idea of device use internally, such as desktops, laptops, and what does it look like user side? Our approach is web-first, and mobile as a first class citizen - so we should design solutions to work across any device where possible. Nearly 50% of our web users access hackney.gov.uk through a non-desktop device. 29. I'm a little unclear about the requirement to "Work openly and iteratively with the project team and be prepared to talk about its work". Apart from the obvious Agile element to this, can you elaborate on what you're hoping to achieve here? We are now adopting the Agile methodology and want to learn from teams delivering work for us. 30. Is only SAR for GDPR is in scope for this work, do you envisage GDPR requirements such as data accuracy, retention, consent, compliance auditing, etc are also in scope? If they are out of scope, has any work been planned or undertaken already? This is purely to manage the requests for information; specifically FOI and SAR (and EIR). The only aspects of data accuracy, retention, consent, compliance auditing that are in scope are those associated with these requests: retention of requests, ability to record consent for SARs where required, auditing on access to personal data in SARs. Any other tools for data accuracy, retention, consent, compliance auditing outside of the above will be procured separately if a need is identified. 31. Are you able to share a budget range for this piece of work? We have not yet set a budget because of the range of responses we might receive. 32. What timescales do you envisage for this piece of work? No particular target live date given the early stage of the project. However, the introduction of general data protection regulations in May 2018 provides a focal point for improving the way we manage requests for information. The way it has gone out to market dictates timescales - this is for the developer to specify in their proposal. We are looking to have something in place in the autumn. 33. Could you name the systems you are currently using to address FOI, SAR, and EIR? We use Covalent for our FOI and EIR requests and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 for our SAR requests. Documents are held in a separate system, OpenText eDOCS which integrates with Covalent to provide a link to the associated documentation. 34. How many people are currently involved in the internal workflow of FOI, SAR, EIR ? It is champions, approvers and the governance team. Our estimate is 150-200. Their use of the system will depend on the functionality - for example approval is currently done outside of the system on the associated documents. There are 3500 staff that could all potentially provide information to feed into a response. With SAR there are very few people accessing these outside of the team, but this needs to be possible because of working with social care for those for care leavers. 35. Have you evaluated any of the "off the shelf" products for FOI, SAR, EIR. No. 36. Do you have any further details on how the Council see the shared risk and reward proposal working? We are looking for suppliers that have experience of arrangements where they either offer a discount on the initial investment against their future exploitation of the intellectual property, or a reward-sharing agreement with the client for any future exploitation of the intellectual property. 37. Be prepared to share risk and reward - have you done that before with others, in terms of a use case? This has not been done at Hackney before, but there are use cases of local authorities working with developers - mysociety for example. There is a track record for a local authority to lead on a project with a developer to build something that would be of use in terms of resale and then reaping the rewards of that. It gets projects kick started, with local authorities taking the lead, and if it comes from local government it is more likely to be useful for local government and taken up, so is mutually beneficial. 38. What model would this be looking at - percentage of the licences, ownership of the product and a percentage share of that. What would Hackney be looking for or is that open for debate? We are open to proposals. 39. You have mentioned about knowledge transfer to help with ongoing development, what angle are you coming from there; to transfer to in-house or another supplier? At Hackney, all our digital services need to meet the Local Government Digital Service Standard and will be starting to follow Agile methodology, and so we would like to learn from whatever team is put in place to help us to develop. There will need to be knowledge transfer of the product as well in order to maintain it in a live environment. 40. In terms of prototyping during this phase are you looking at lo-fi prototyping or a functional system? We would prefer a functioning prototype, but recognise that will depend on the technical complexity / the scope of any existing solution that's being proposed by the supplier 41. Will the supplier be responsible for recruitment of internal users? No. 42. Does the envisaged user research extend to Requesters (ie. the public) and if so who is responsible for the recruitment? Yes. We can contact a pool of residents to seek engagement in user research. 43. Will you help with the recruitment of a representative group of users and stakeholders, to interview as part of the discovery process? Does this group need to be national, within London or within the borough? Yes we will identify users and stakeholders within the organisation and the borough to participate in the process. 44. Does prototyping also includes processes definition, verification, collation, redacted and releasing for SAR requests? We expect prototyping to teach us more about the requirements for an end-to-end solution but not necessarily that a prototype would deliver complex functionality (eg redaction) 45. Are you open to migrating documents from Open Text to other identified document source? If the new solution held documents with the right level of control, we would consider migrating documents for open requests but may decide to have dual running and a fresh start in the new system. 46. Any preference towards using Cloud based or On-Premise Software? Cloud by preference. 47. Is there any estimate on number of citizen count who will use the application either to raise their request or view published responses per day? We have no numbers for potential views of published responses. We currently receive c. 1800 FOI requests and 150 SAR requests per year. 48. Do you have plans for porting it as a responsive web application for mobiles or as a mobile app? We would prefer a solution that is designed for mobiles but meets the needs of users of any device.