GIS Solution.

Descriptions

Kent County Council (“the Council”) and each of the borough and district councils in Kent run separate GIS systems. In April 2013 the Council and Tunbridge Wells Borough Council (“TWBC”) established a shared service GIS partnership.There is a requirement to replace the current GIS infrastructure at the Council, redesign the GIS service, and review and implement options for the delivery of value added application and data packages to Council partners and customers. It is anticipated that a cloud-based solution will achieve these aims.The expected strengths and opportunities of this cloud GIS platform are:— Allows businesses, communities and individuals to collaborate virtually.— Provides virtual storage space.— Provides fast and accessible information.— Flexibility.— Agility.— Faster time to market based on initial skill resources.— Lower initial capital investment.— Can scale quickly against demand/growth.— 24 x 7 support with high availability.— More effective communication and collaboration.— Better quality of work.— Saves money, time and effort.— Mobility.— Scalability.The objective of this procurement is to deliver a flexible GIS infrastructure to meet the needs of the Council and its partners, over the period of the contract. A contract for a cloud hosted GIS enterprise platform providing software and service supported by a best-value licence agreement is sought to support these business objectives. This service must be scalable and flexible with appropriate charging mechanisms to reflect changes in service demand upwards or downwards.The Council and TWBC have established a GIS shared service partnership. This partnership is set up to address the opportunity to eliminate the duplication of investment in hardware, software and data that arise as a result of each council in the County having their own GIS systems. In addition there is an opportunity to focus the human resources in a single centre of excellence that can serve Kent and neighbouring public services. There has been an objective within Kent, and this is reflected in the ICT Strategy for the Council and in the Kent Public Services ICT Strategy, to achieve such a rationalisation which would save money, and consolidate and grow expertise, so that a single Kent GIS would be a centre of excellence supporting Kent public services and other partner organisations.There is a clear demand for GIS services from District Councils and other public service bodies. GIS can be a clear and distinct service offering and therefore is a good candidate for developing a shared services business model. One of the objectives of this project is to develop a sound business model which clearly identifies the costs of the services, the customers, the revenue streams and organisational structure required to deliver a shared service. For this reason a cloud-based model has been selected so that a clear pricing strategy can be established based on usage and the solution can be quickly scaled up or down depending on demand.