Government seeks bids for public services project

Several of the world's biggest high-tech firms, including Microsoft and Oracle, are preparing bids to build a crucial part of the Republic's e-government infrastructure.

The firms want to build a public services broker that would provide citizens with a single system to access public services over the telephone, internet or in person.

The cost of the project has not yet been decided but it is likely to run into tens of millions of euros and involve a consortium of companies in the technology sector.

The Government tender is published in the current edition of the European Journal. It requires firms to prove they have the technical and financial ability to undertake the project.

The proposed broker would provide a suite of public services online and enable citizens to apply for passports or complete tax forms over the internet.

The successful bidder would be required to build a system that catalogues information about services, manages the delivery of those services and creates a vault to store customer information.

To access public services from a single point of contact, citizens would be required to sign up to a registration process through which they can uniquely identify themselves to the broker.

Each citizen will be able to use his/her own Personal Public Service Number as a single identification number to make it easier to access the range of services.

According to Mr Oliver Ryan, director of the Reach Agency that is overseeing the implementation of technology in Government services, the cost of the project would depend on the proposals received.

"Each level of activity will have its own level of expenditure . . . It will be funded from the development fund of the Information Society Project," he said.

Mr Ryan said the initial tender would not seek a price from vendors but was a pre-qualification round for firms to prove their financial and technical viability to bid for the project.

However, a proof-of-concept project has already been completed by consultancy group KPMG and may be put into practice sometime in the next couple of months, Mr Ryan said.

"We learnt a lot from that about the technology, software and the business processes and the relationships between the different agencies," he said.

The intention of the broker is to make it possible for each citizen to store all their public records and information with one central data vault or e-government broker.

A customer or agency will then be able to access this broker to extract the necessary information to supply a passport, driving licence or social security payments.

This should dramatically reduce the amount of paperwork needed to serve customers. However, it may also raise other issues, such as the right to privacy.

The closing date for receipt of initial bids from companies is noon, February 26th.

Tender documents can be downloaded at http://www.reach.ie/new.htm#psb1. Companies who might tender a bid include Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun Microsystems and systems integration firms such as Accenture, KPMG and Cap Gemini.