Defence rethinks $200m Kaz contract

The Department of Defence has called for suppliers to put forth information in relation to a proposed new model for providing the services in its $200 million central ICT infrastructure contract, currently serviced by Fujitsu's Kaz Group.

(Credit: Department of Defence)

Kaz won the five-year deal in 2005 and now provides the help desk for Defence's restricted, secret and top secret networks, server and desktop operations, network operations, watch function and email and groupware operations. The services are provided from Canberra. On-site services for Defence's over 400 fixed sites are provided under a $240 million agreement with Unisys.

Defence would like to add application and IT service management tools support, as well as a project function to the core services provided in the new deal, according to the tender documents, which said that Defence might also occasionally need to source IT service management business reform, voice services and customer relationship management and engagement.

However, the services might not be provided in the same way going forward as they have been in the past. The tender was accompanied with a letter to respondents, explaining that it wished the next supplier of the services to work using a new model. It said that Defence was testing the waters with the tender for a new resourcing model that would be flexible and scalable to the department's changing needs.

"Defence envisages a service provision model where questions of contract scope do not arise. Rather, requirements for additional or different resources will be determined by: objectively-measurable workload; current numbers and type of personnel; the numbers and types of personnel needed for the additional requirement; and the capacity to redeploy or reassign personnel," the tender documents read.

Given that, Defence didn't want pricing of services in response to its request, but instead pricing for personnel to provide those services. The future supplier would ideally either supply personnel for Defence direction, or could supply and manage personnel, or could manage Defence personnel, with scalable numbers depending on demand.

The tender documents noted that the CIO group had divided IT into five parts: distributed computing (service desks, workstations, mobile devices and regional ICT equipment), centralised computing (mainframe computing and storage), terrestrial computing (network), specialist communications and applications.

The services required in this tender were related to the first and third part. However, the documents said that Defence intended to bundle its sourcing structure so that one supplier would have responsibility for all service delivery where Defence did not undertake it itself.

Defence has 82,700 Windows Workstations, 1873 Windows servers, 220 Unix services, 8400 printers, 150,000 fixed telephones or faxes, 20,000 mobile phones, 750 routers and 6050 switches. The number of restricted network users topped 80,000 while there were over 12,000 secret network users and less than 1000 top secret network users.

The letter said that the outcome of the request for information might be the decision to either tender all the services mentioned or only part of them. Defence intended to use the process to identify a list of service providers, which might be invited to participate in that procurement. Defence hoped to have any necessary transition completed by the expiration date of the contract, November 2010.