Request for Proposal

2.0 HIGH-LEVEL REQUIREMENTS

• 
  Core Requirements:
  

• 
  Development, Testing and Deployment. The provision of an integrated development environment, including graphical and code-based design tools, testing and debugging facilities, and tools to manage deployment of developments between environments.
  
• 
  Management and Monitoring. The ability to monitor and analyse run-time performance and manage the platform to identify problems and exceptions and take remedial actions.
  
• 
  Security. Capability supporting common authentication, encryption and signing standards, combined with a platform authorisation and access model. Includes support for secure network access across DMZs using proxies. Must not introduce vulnerabilities into EBRD networks; software components should be designed in accordance with industry security best practices, to be validated by independent security assessment.
  
• 
  Non-functional characteristics. Usability and productivity, especially of the design and deployment tools; supportability (in terms of mix of technologies and skills); cohesion (overall simplicity of the product architecture); orthogonality (cross-applicability of independent features); scalability, configuration for availability, etc.
  

Specific questions about the proposed UXP platform are set out under these headings in Annex B – Core Requirements.

Responses to the questions in the following section should be submitted as part of the Supplier’s Narrative Response a template for which is provided as Annex C of the RFP.

• 
  Standard navigation header and footer, with EBRD styling.
  
• 
  An enterprise search function, allowing rapid federated search of enterprise resources (static pages, OpenText Livelink, ebrd.com, other documents and indexed application content) in one place. This would include staff directories (“Who’s who”).
  
• 
  An EBRD news area, similar to the current intranet homepage’s news section. This could also include alerts and notices when necessary.
  
• 
  A departmental news area, with content relevant to and managed by the user’s department.
  
• 
  A team links area for links to common resources relevant to the department.
  
• 
  A universal task list, showing workflow tasks for the user drawn from a range of back-end systems (SAP, Appian…); see section 3.2 below.
  
• 
  A universal calendar, showing events and task deadlines drawn from a variety of systems which are relevant to the user.
  
• 
  A personalised apps area containing links to the user’s commonly used applications
  
• 
  A personal feed area showing latest updates from discussions and other collaborative fora to which the user has subscribed.
  
• 
  Embedded presence indicator linked to the Bank’s unified communications platform.
  

• 
  Customisation – the ability for users to rearrange the layout of their homepage, prioritising or hiding content in their personal zone as they see fit.
  
• 
  Additional application content – if a business application is particularly important to a team or department, it may be possible to integrate core content (beyond tasks and events) from that application into a ‘widget’ to be included in hub pages for those users.
  

Responsive design should be used to make the homepage easy to access on handheld devices:

• 
  Web content management (Oracle WebCenter Sites) – will be needed to create and manage the static content which will remain at the heart of the intranet.
  
• 
  Collaboration tools (SAP Jam) – to support collaborative content and messaging.
  
• 
  Identity Management (TBC) – to support and manage personalised presentation of content by users’ team and role.
  
• 
  Enterprise search (TBC) – to support the federation of search queries across multiple repositories, and aggregation of results into a common format.
  
• 
  Unified communications (Cisco Jabber) – to support instant messaging, presence and other personal communications.
  
• 
  Integration services (via RESTful Web Services) – to bring together content from a wide range of source systems for the task list, calendar, feed etc.
  

Describe how your product can support this use case, interoperating with the other software capabilities just described.

1. 
   My employees’ Leave Requests (ECC MSS)
   
2. 
   My employees’ Service Request approvals (ServiceNow)
   
3. 
   My Tasks triggered by other Business Applications (i.e. Appian BPM, bespoke systems)
   

1. 
   Bank-wide
   
2. 
   Department-wide
   
3. 
   Team-wide
   
4. 
   Triggered by other Business Applications (i.e. bespoke systems)
   
5. 
   Personal
   

1. 
   Search the EBRD employee directory (typeahead search)
   
2. 
   View Employee details (including pictures)
   
3. 
   View organisation chart
   
4. 
   View employee’s online presence status (Cisco Jabber)
   
5. 
   Initiate a chat session, share a screen or place a call (via Cisco Jabber client)
   
6. 
   View employee’s activity stream (via SAP Jam: blog posts, published wiki pages, documents, videos, comments, etc.)
   

• 
  Upload documents.
  
• 
  Make disbursement applications online.
  
• 
  Receive statements and notifications. An alert system notifies interested parties whenever new items are added or changed.
  
• 
  View reports and simple content derived from back-end systems.
  
• 
  Initiate requests (for disbursements, waivers, prepayments, etc.) which trigger workflow items to the relevant internal teams to respond via their Universal Task List.
  

• 
  Incorporate a standalone SPAs built with well-known JavaScript frameworks (i.e. AngularJS, Ember, React, Polymer) as widgets on UXP pages.
  

We have a set of workflows processes, based on a BPM platform, which would be shown as a Universal Task List UI Component on UXP page and need to carry out fetch and update operations against our project management system (based on SAP ECC). The typical sequence would be an approval of a project element: fetch of project details, followed by update of project status to “approved” or “on hold”. SAP ECC exposes SOAP web-services to the ESB to support these fetch and update operations, which are in turn exposed as SOAP services to the BPM platform. For audit and authorisation purposes, it is important to us that all operations are carried out in the SAP ECC system under the user ID of the person who executed the relevant process step on the BPM platform. The BPM platform supports Kerberos SSO for user sign-on, and supports SAML subject confirmation via SOAP using the “sender vouches” profile to assert the identity of its users to the UXP when consuming RESTful web services. How can your UXP propagate user identities between UXP and BPM, and ECC back-ends?

The Bank uses Apache Subversion for source management and version control. A typical scenario would involve the simultaneous deployment to a test or production environment, of changes to UI components together with changes to integration features which serve those components.

Describe how your UXP can integrate with Subversion or use other techniques to facilitate orchestrated deployments of related UI and integration changes.
If a major failure of one change package requires reversion of the whole deployment, describe how your UXP could support this roll-back.
3.9 Retracing our steps

A sequence of hard-to-diagnose intermittent errors occurs in background integration activities involving several systems which serve the UXP. In order to understand the cause, we need to start detailed logging and tracing of integration operations, targeted at those systems and certain specific UXP operations we believe are involved. Describe how we can configure your product to provide such detailed and targeted message logs and activity traces, security logging and integration with SIEM; and the tools to analyse such logs and traces after the fact in order to support diagnostic work.

The Bank has business continuity provision involving replication of key systems in near real-time at a remote “disaster recovery” site. The UXP would be part of our critical infrastructure and would be included in this provision. Please describe how your UXP failover architecture could provide a scalable, fault-tolerant business continuity solution during a disaster event.

Performance of the User Experience Platform will be a critical factor in the overall performance of applications using services. Please describe the ability to scale the components to manage the throughput performance of your UXP.

As a critical infrastructure component, we will need to configure our UXP to be highly available with redundancy and seamless failover provision. Please describe the configuration options for your UXP to ensure availability.

• 
  Variant: how can we exploit these same options to provide combined throughput AND availability benefits without excessive redundant provision?
  
• 
  Variant: How can these options support the business continuity requirement described above.
  

We will need to incorporate an UXP instance in our regression and other test landscapes. Accordingly, ease of creation and reconfiguration of copies of our production UXP for use in testing is an important requirement. Please describe the steps by which you would recommend we create such test instances, paying particular attention to the range of components that need to be created or copied, and the configuration steps needed to connect them both to each other and to corresponding test instances of the other systems in the test environment.

1 Product partially meets the Bank’s requirements/requires customisation or integration with a third party product to meet the Bank’s requirements.

2 Product fully meets the Bank’s requirements with out of the box functionality (subject to standard configuration).

3 Product exceeds the Bank’s requirements and offers a degree of innovation that differentiates it from other available products.

• 
  Suppliers are required to provide a description and justification for each of their responses.
  
• 
  Please note that the TEP will be scoring the Supplier’s response based on this information.
  
• 
  Should the TEP be satisfied with the justification, suppliers may not be penalised for meeting a requirement through the use of third party products or by customisation of their base product. However, any related costs (additional licensing, professional services etc.) must be clearly indicated in the Suppliers’ Financial Proposal.
  

This template is to be used for Vendor responses to the narrative questions set out in section 3.0 of Annex A – UXP Requirements of the RFP document.

• 
  Suppliers shall enter their response in the response section under each question title. Refer to the RFP document for the full question text.
  
• 
  Suppliers should focus on how their products can support the scenarios the Bank have described, emphasising the most appropriate features of both the design and run-time environments for the purpose. If there are several viable approaches, please do include them.
  
• 
  The suggested length of responses is up to one page per question, extending to two pages for the most complex questions. Diagrams may be used. Note that concision and relevance of the response to the specifics of the question are important evaluation factors; the inclusion of generic support or marketing material is discouraged. Suppliers should not repeat material between questions; a reference to the previous instance will suffice.
  
• 
  For status of components used, please list the product components alluded to in your response, and for each one, detail (a) if it is your own, or a third-party product; and (b) if custom development beyond the standard configuration options offered by the product is required to support any aspects of the scenario covered.
  

2.1 Project Implementation Timeline

Phase 1 – Design / Preparation

Phase 2 – Commissioning of the trial UXP software in to the EBRD environment

Phase 3 – PoC

Phase 4 - Adoption of the UXP

Phase 5 – Further strategic development of the UI layer utilising the UXP (as described in the potential use-cases)

2.2 Implementation Services

The Bank requires that Suppliers provide professional services to implement phases 1-3 of the above timeline. The Suppliers Narrative Response will include the following:

• 
  Proposed approach, methodology and project governance.
  
• 
  CVs of the Project Team which the Supplier is proposing to deliver the implementation, identifying their experience of implementation of (e.g. a “lead” consultant), their contract status (permanent or subcontracted staff), and their length of time with the company.
  
• 
  Work Plan and Team Assignment, detailing key milestones.
  
• 
  Include any training necessary for Bank staff to administer, configure and operate the software. This may include shadowing the implementation consultants and/or some formal training
  
• 
  Describe any commitments that would be made to address a situation where a key member of the Implementation team (that your firm supplied) unexpectedly became unavailable.
  
• 
  Outline of the capacity to draw on resources when necessary from other areas of the Supplier’s organisation.
  

The cost of this implementation should be included in the quotation file

3.0 Architecture and Product Support
The Bank requires that Suppliers provide the following information as part of their Narrative Response.

• 
  The Supplier must identify the technical skills/training required to maintain and manage the solution.
  
• 
  The Supplier must provide details of its upgrade/patching release policy and approach to product upgrades.
  
• 
  The Supplier must provide an overview of the proposed development roadmap for the products under their control which are used in the solution.
  
• 
  The Supplier must show a clear development path for the solution, demonstrating commitment to support the latest and future versions of MS Windows and MS Office.
  
• 
  The Bank requires full technical support during UK office hours (09:00-17:00, Mon-Fri). The Supplier must provide the details of its support offering which most closely matches this requirement.
  

• 
  The Supplier must identify whether any support will be provided by a third party and if so how this will be delivered in accordance with the Bank’s requirements.
  
• 
  Describe at an overview level the complete lifecycle of a support call – from the point the Bank initiates the call to its resolution, specifically indicating:
  

• 
  The method of call logging
  
• 
  Standard SLAs
  
• 
  Integration of SLAs into the call logging system.
  
• 
  Internal escalation procedures
  
• 
  External escalation procedures
  
• 
  Remote support capability
  
• 
  Capability to provide on-site resources as requested
  
• 
  Describe any methodology, quality control system and/or “good” practice” initiatives that you would employ to facilitate the delivery of high quality support.
  

• 
  Specify any technical infrastructure that will be required at the Bank to facilitate support. Any additional costs that will be incurred by the Bank i.e. telecoms costs, licensing must be reflected in Annex D – Quotation File.
  
• 
  Describe the process for providing professional services to the Bank. Professional services.
  
• 
  Describe the level of flexibility in dealing with issues that may require consultants on-site and when responding to ad-hoc requests.
  

Annex D – Scope of Proof of Concept

Annex E – Quotation File

Directory: documents
documents -> Concept stage
documents -> Concept stage
documents -> The great global switch-off
documents -> Nonprofit grant application
documents -> The Truth about the Rwandan Genocide
documents -> Annual InStructional unit plan
documents -> Chaos equipment included

Download 121.6 Kb.

Share with your friends: