Step Two - background to the requirements

Section two - the first section of the SOR - is designed to present to suppliers the background and business context. You need to describe the business and statutory role of your education organisation. A brief history of the education organisation and a review at a high level of the key functions it performs and its mission statement or vision for the future.

You should describe the current organisation – the central administration departments; the faculties or schools and how they are divided up into departments plus other departments/services and companies owned by the education organisation etc. For each department you should specify the full time staff establishment and the locations they operate from. All the information you need here should have been gathered in stage three.

You then need to describe the current policies, procedures and systems used to manage content, documents and records including e-mail. Do you have an archive service? Do you have a semi-current records service? Do you use commercial offsite storage services? Do you have any Electronic Document Management systems? Do you have a Web Content Management system?

You should provide volumetrics including the volume of paper records held; the volume of electronic documents held; the volume of e-mails held. You should list the software applications used to create content and documents across the education organisation and include any planned new systems.

You should then review the business objectives identified for the EDRM or Enterprise Content Management solution including all your record keeping objectives.

Finally you should present in detail your current IS strategy and ICT infrastructure. This should include a review of any corporate standards for hardware and software, current supported environments and planned future direction. You should detail all the corporate IT applications including your student administration system; your finance and human resources systems; your Web content management systems; other core databases. You should also list all the main departmental IT applications.

This data is important to enable the suppliers to understand the scope and culture of your education organisation and your preferred IT platforms. It will help them to scope the roll out requirement and challenges.

While there is a considerable volume of data to be gathered – most of it should have been gathered as part of stage three so the amount of effort required at this stage should not be too demanding.