The Ministry of Defence has published a tender looking for service management services to support its “New Style of IT” programme.
The contract, which has a value between £10m and £20m, is for just over two years, from the end of January 2017 to the end of March 2019.
The tender follows a request from the Ministry of Defence in August looking for suppliers to provide their thinking on “in-service support service management”.
According to the MoD tender, deployed UK forces use complex information systems to give them the ability to command, control and communicate with allies. However, the UK rarely deploys on operations in isolation from coalition partners, so it needs a system that is able to operate with them.
Describing the NSoIT(D) system, the MoD said, “It will be the MoD designed and owned deployable communications and information system for UK and multinational military missions. The system of systems will eventually provide services in the security domains SUKEO (Red), MISSION SECRET (Blue) and OFFICIAL (Black), but was primarily developed with a design to work at MISSION SECRET; this was under the JACKDAW and MAGPIE projects which will converge into NSOIT(D) programme within the life of this contract.”
The MoD indicated that overall service management of the system is provided jointly by MoD personnel, including civil servants and service personnel, as well as a contracted managed service provider (MSP). It uses the ISS Target Supply Chain Service Integration and Management (SIAM) processes which is based on the ITIL framework as a basis for service management activity, complimented by MoD policy and procedure.
The MoD indicated that the chosen MSP will be responsible for facilitating much of the NSoIT(D) supply chain, with facilities to store MoD assets held at varying levels of readiness ideally up to IL5 security classification, and coordinate their onward distribution into the Joint Supply Chain.
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It added that the MSP should be agnostic to the hardware and software within the NSoIT(D) design and be expected to support, through both service management and supply chain management, an array of capabilities from numerous manufacturers and suppliers that form the NSoIT(D).
