Market Sounding Consultation Exercise for Data and Insights Platform

Huntingdonshire District Council (HDC) is seeking expressions of interest from suitably qualified suppliers for the future provision of a Hosted Platform for Data and Insights. This is a market engagement exercise, not an invitation to submit tenders or quotations.

We are undertaking a market engagement to understand what the market can offer and what innovation providers can offer HDC. The market engagement will also help us to refine the service specification before going out either to tender.

The objective of this market engagement exercise is to understand, through a Business Case proposal, the approaches and potential costs of implementing an appropriately designed and configured Data Platform (Data Lake, or Data Lakehouse), utilising pre-built Insights and Predictive Analytics capabilities, as used within other Local Government customers, within twelve months.

We are also seeking to:

• i)Understand the deployment models available to enable either a segmented shared single platform, or separate data platforms for each Council, alongside the maintenance and sustainability consideration of each;
• ii)Establish appropriate governance (policy and procedural), security controls, and platform administration approaches to deliver against proven templated models, and providing training/mentoring to 3C ICT and Council staff to ensure future continued compliance. Consideration of a Managed Service Governance and Control model.
• iii)Benefit from a Managed Service and support approach to maintain the delivered functionality (such as data pipeline monitoring and maintenance) and to respond to system changes and reconfigurations, as necessary
• iv)Understand the cost avoidance/cashable benefits realised by other Local Authorities in undertaking a similar approach to that presented, and to be able to articulate the immediate and future benefits of adopting the approach presented

The proposals will then be evaluated to select the best 4/5 submissions to submit full proposal and participate in a competitive tendering process.