Four councils in the Wellington region are looking at the possible development of shared information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and how this could be managed.The participating councils are Greater Wellington Regional Council, Porirua City Council, Upper Hutt City Council and Wellington City Council.
The four councils are part of the Shared ICT Infrastructure Programme established to develop a business case to assess whether to implement shared ICT infrastructure and investigate the best way to manage and deliver this.
A request for proposals (RFP) was released today on the Government Electronic Tenders Service (GETS) website. The responses to the RFP will help to develop the business case.
If the business case is approved later in the year, shared ICT infrastructure is expected to include standard, commodity ICT infrastructure, such as: data centres and storage; servers; data and voice networks; telephony services; desktops; and an ICT service desk.
Channa Jayasinha, Programme Owner, says ICT is increasingly important to the way councils operate and those taking part in the programme are keen to see if there are innovative ways to provide improved services more efficiently.
“We believe our organisations and customers would benefit from having more responsive, flexible and reliable ICT infrastructure and have come together to explore the pros and cons of a joint approach.”

Potential suppliers have until 15 August to respond to the RFP. A decision on the business case is due to be made in late October or November 2014.