Credit: Supplied
The Ministry of Social Development (MSD) is aiming to establish a panel of ICT architecture services suppliers to support its future strategy – Te Pae Tawhiti.
The agency is seeking enterprise architects, domain architects, solution architects and applications, data, integration, infrastructure and security architects.
Te Pae Tawhiti is a large, multi-year, multi-cloud transformation expected to deliver services that are easier, more accessible and integrated across employment, housing, and income support and greater use of partnering.
The procurement will support the department's improvement systems and technology group (IST) to deliver the requirements of the business efficiently and effectively, a tender notice said.
"Having a panel of suppliers in place to provide resourcing will allow the ministry to meet its objectives," it said. "So, there is a need for MSD to establish a panel of specialised ICT suppliers to provide ongoing services as and when required."
The architecture practice is a growing team of 30-40 architects within the IST unit of MSD's transformation group.
MSD said it was of primary importance to establish constructive, long-standing partnerships with its panellists.
"Architecture is a long game, where continuity of IP and ongoing relationship development will be critical to maintaining momentum and achieving success," the tender said.
"Architecture at MSD is about evolving a shared understanding of the business need, the perspectives and context of each stakeholder, and the overall systems design."
To maintain effective relationships, the architecture team would spend most of their time working on-site in MSD's Wellington or Auckland head offices but remote working was also supported "where appropriate".
MSD estimated a need for approximately five architects in the first year, with demand for additional resources changing incrementally but capped at fifteen architects. The estimated spend for architects on the panel was up to $4.8 million a year.
The ministry had $70 million assigned for IT asset renewals and was spending this financial year investing in the foundations needed to manage a multi-cloud hosting environment so it could migrate away from an on-premise model and support cloud native services.
Credit: Reseller News Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure platforms and cloud firewall and security were scheduled for development, MSD told Parliament's social services and community committee in June.
PWC, Accenture and KPMG were named as strategic partners in Te Pae Tawhiti while Accenture, Spark and Datacom were named as partners in the $18.2 million project to develop cloud capabilities.
MSD administers over $18 billion and processes 45 million payment transactions, as well as meeting with clients face-to-face 2.3 million times each year. It takes around nine million phone calls through contact centres and employs about 10,000 staff operating across 325 locations.
However, the ministry was wrestling to stay ahead of its technical debt as one system reached its third decade.
It had become increasingly difficult to maintain and support these systems while delivering timely policy changes and ensuring positive experiences for clients, partners, and staff, the ministry told Parliament's social services and community committee in March.
"If the ministry’s systems are not available and fit for purpose for staff, clients or partners, delivery of critical MSD services could be significantly impacted and may result in failure to help New Zealanders in need," the ministry wrote in answer to the committee's questions.
In addition, as with all organisations, MSD faced growing cyber security risks which had to be continuously monitored and mitigated.
