In a Request for Proposal released Monday, Orange County is calling on technology companies for “IT project management and project portfolio management software and implementati.” The county — the state’s third most populous at nearly 3.2 million — seeks “cloud-hosted software as a service (SaaS) information technology project management (PM) and project portfolio management (PPM) software and implementation services” to be used by Orange County Information Technology (OCIT) and business stakeholders. The county centralized its IT service delivery in 2014 in OCIT, which created the IT shared services delivery model the following year. Participating departments include Child Support Services, Community Resources, Public Works, Probation, the Social Services Agency and the county Executive Office. As part of IT shared services, the RFP said, OCIT provides services and support to these departments that include infrastructure and server support; apps development and maintenance; cybersecurity and data analytics. Among the takeaways:
- The contractor selected will be charged with delivering “end-to-end, secure hosting and technical support of all hardware and software” needed to operate the proposed solution; and operating and maintaining the servers in accordance with the county’s PM/PPM system technical requirements. The contractor must also deliver all software licenses and support capable of meeting county requirements. These include architecture that enables optimal 24-7 performance, hosting in a “highly secure” U.S. data center that keeps information in the U.S., and provision for continued delivery in the event of an outage or disaster. The contractor must also keep the county’s data separate from other customers, return it when the contract ends and recover it if there’s a system failure.
- Security requirements include the ability to integrate with the county’s active directory system using security assertion markup language (SAML) for single sign-on — available before the go-live. Also required is secure password storage with “a minimum of 256-bit encryption” as well as secure data transmission. The PM/PPM system sessions must support Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.0 or better connections, and must be the same TLS version as county systems.
- The submission deadline for questions on the RFP has not yet been reached but the county has included several of its early responses in the RFP. Asked what enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform must be integrated, officials indicated “CGI HR, Payroll and Financial Systems; Workforce timekeeping system.” Asked “Regarding agile tools, what integrations are in scope for the initial implementation,” officials said current agile practices “are limited to application development activities, (for) which we currently use Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS).”
- Among the minimum qualifications for potential candidates, applicant organizations must have been in business at least five years “providing and implementing an IT PM/PPM solution.” Applicants must also offer a SaaS solution on an approved government cloud “e.g. Microsoft Azure GCC, Amazon AWS GovCloud.” On-prem solutions will not be considered. The applicant must also have done at least three similar projects during the past three years — i.e., “providing an IT PM/PPM solution for a public agency” such as local, state or federal government or to a similar entity.
- The contract value is not specified, although it will be a fixed fee for services rendered according to the RFP. The contract term is three years with the option of two one-year extensions on mutual agreement. Renewals may require approval by the Orange County Board of Supervisors, and the county does not have to give any reason for declining to renew. Questions are due by 3 p.m. Dec. 14; proposals are due by 4 p.m. Jan. 4. Times for presentations and demonstrations are to be determined.
