Making email filing effortless (Discovery)

Tender description

Summary of the work Discovery task to develop technology improvement options to support effective individual management of email in conjunction with major office services and potential for vendor-neutral archiving. Expected Contract Length 8 weeks Latest start date Monday 22 January 2018 Budget Range The budget range is £80,000 - £99,000 excluding VAT. Travel, subsistence and all other expenses must be included in the overall cost. Why the Work is Being Done This work is being done as part of an early phase of the Better Information for Better Government programme. This is a cross-government initiative to improve how government manages its digital information and facilitates collaboration online. The Cabinet Office is leading work to adapt core processes and attitudes to information in departments to fit with new digital ways of working in the 21st century civil service. This discovery phase activity must complete by 31 March 2018. Problem to Be Solved Many current systems require significant additional effort from users if important emails are to be correctly saved as business records (not just in their email application / service). This can result in important emails not being transferred and potentially lost. Who Are the Users As a public servant I need to easily and quickly identify important emails, and then save them in the right location as defined by my organisation's information management policy so that I can fulfill my obligation to keep proper records. As an information management professional I need to understand how best to support general users of email and office systems, to enable the effective management of the information they contain and to consider approaches to interoperability and vendor-neutral archiving so that I can ensure my organisation's long-term compliance with its legal and policy obligations. Work Already Done Many government departments, other agencies and public bodies have undertaken activities to work towards solutions to this problem. The discovery and synthesis of this work will be an important component of this opportunity. The programme team has created a list of planned outputs and desired outcomes from the discovery phase. Existing Team The supplier will be working with a small team of Civil Servants in the Cabinet Office / The National Archives and possibly with other suppliers undertaking related concurrent discovery activity. Current Phase Discovery Skills & Experience • Have experience of working with multiple government departments / agencies on a single project (5 points) • Have experience in successfully providing knowledge transfer to client teams (5 points) • Have experience of conducting user research across a mix of general and specialist (e.g. KIM profession) staff (4 points) Nice to Haves • Have experience in working with small client teams in 'start up' mode (2 points) • Have experience of projects involving regulatory compliance beyond security and data protection (2 points) • Have experience of projects involving SaaS office systems including MS Office 365 or G-Suite, preferably both (2 points) Work Location Interactions with the programme team will be in London and it is anticipated that a significant proportion of research activities will be London based. Working Arrangments We will want the team to work from their own premises, or remotely, meeting with the programme team weekly - at least half of these meeting to be onsite in Whitehall. The programme team will provide a point of contact for initial user research and other meeting requirements. No. of Suppliers to Evaluate 3 Proposal Criteria • Approach and methodology (7 points) • How the approach meets user needs (5 points) • How the approach meets your organisation’s policy or goal (5 points) • How the supplier intends to ensure effective knowledge transfer (8 points) • How they’ve identified risks and dependencies and offered approaches to manage them (5 points) • Team structure (3 points) • Estimated timeframes for the work (2 points) • Value for money (5 points) Cultural Fit Criteria • Work as a team with our organisation and other suppliers, in a self-starting fashion: not over-reliant on the small client team (6 points) • Be transparent and collaborative both in decision making and, more generally, to facilitate knowledge transfer (8 points) • Be comfortable working at the boundary between modern digital ways of working and formal procedures and policies (6 points) Payment Approach Fixed price Evaluation Weighting Technical competence 60% Cultural fit 20% Price 20% Questions from Suppliers 1. “The programme team has created a list of planned outputs and desired outcomes from the discovery phase.“ Can this list be shared? Thanks[Answer will be in two parts, outputs and outcomes, for the two lists] In developing the opportunity the team had the following planned outputs in mind, but these are not intended to constrain responses.Report and research artifacts covering:- User research on email management in Google / MS O365 environments;- Synthesis of major departmental activities (3rd party plug-ins, technology development, behaviour change campaigns) in email domain;- Recommendations for technology development in alpha phase;- Stretch: alpha prototype of Govt owned plug-in(s);- Stretch: Architectural concept design for vendor-agnostic email information processing capability. 2. “The programme team has created a list of planned outputs and desired outcomes from the discovery phase.“ Can this list be shared? Thanks[Answer will be in two parts, outputs and outcomes, for the two lists] In developing the opportunity the team had the following desired outcomes in mind, but these are not intended to constrain responses.- Departments, other agencies and public bodies are enabled to adopt good practice approaches;- Increased Departmental buy-in to programme;- Programme Team able to facilitate development of cross-government designs patterns;- Programme Team better placed to engage with vendors at strategic level;- Programme Team is well-placed to provide direction for next stage and to exploit discovery outputs. 3. Should the entire solution be vendor neutral? Or just be able to work with different email providers This discovery activity is intended to explore ways of significantly improving day-to-day management of email by individuals using a range of email providers. The phrase "...potential for vendor-neutral archiving..." as an area for exploration refers to the potential benefits of being able to manage and exploit an email archive populated over a number of years, irrespective of changes in email providers.