Ausschreibungen

Legal Aid Board is an administrative body under Dutch law. The primary service provided by Legal Aid Board is defined formally in the Wet op de Rechtsbijstand (Act on legal aid) and is characterized in practice as being a broker and administrator concerning the government-funded relationships and exchanges between citizens who require legal services, on the one hand, and the institutions and professionals that provide such services on the other. Legal Aid Board consists of five co-ordinated regions that are located in five different districts, throughout the Netherlands. Each region has its own databases; additionally some of the databases are centralized. Besides this region there are four locations offering legal aid to asylum seekers. The central services of Legal Aid Board are located in Utrecht (the Netherlands) along with several centrally maintained IT-facilities. Information Management (IM) is Legal Aid Board's unit responsible for IT services. In this perspective, Legal Aid Board occupies the position of a central hub in a network of co-operating organizations. The relations between Legal Aid Board and the co-operating organizations are legally connected through the above mentioned Act, via agreements and policies. The agreements form the titles for the IT infrastructure used by Legal Aid Board and for the software interfaces required. The whole may be seen as a form of co-operative service provision under administrative rule, facilitating the private relationships between the citizen and legal professionals. As such, the IT infrastructure and the interfaces needed for effective co-operation are subject to frequent changes, imposed by political and legislative authorities. With IDEA, Legal Aid Board whishes to achieve the following goals: Organizational: 1. Put the customer at the center of Legal Aid Board’s work. The current ´customer´ is the legal professional (lawyer or mediator) but Legal Aid Board wants to move increasingly towards the litigant (the individual in need of legal support). 2. Reduce the turnaround time (for example, reduce the time for processing the requests for legal support or the evaluation of the performance of the legal counsel). 3. Increase customer satisfaction. 4. Reduce the time to process changes, or new products, into the software systems. Governmental: 5. Reduce the administrative burden. 6. Reduce the overall costs for the organization concerning IT by at least 20 %. This regards both the operational IT as well as new developments. For information management: 7. Reduce the complexity of the application and infrastructural landscape: — IM is currently using about 90 servers to support Legal Aid Board. Therefore, the infrastructure is rather complex. Some examples: —— The IT acceptance environment which has already been implemented. The building of this acceptance environment procedure took 8 months to develop. Any change to this procedure would require considerable investment in both time and energy, —— The application software is integrated with Word (from MS Office). This requires the alignment of applications with the Office software. It is currently not possible to upgrade for instance from the Internet Explorer version 6 to 7 or higher. Such dependencies, as well as rigidities, between the different software programs should be reduced. 8. Comply with the open standards/open source policy (see Annex 5) 9. Be able to serve Legal Aid Board in an easy way, e.g. by using web services: — Development platform. The current development platform is based on Ingres. The database is also based on Ingres, an open source software which functions according to expectations. But the development language Ingres presents challenges. In fact, there are only few developers available and the version currently used is outdated. It is hard to integrate with Filenet (Legal Aid Board uses this for WFM/DM) and it is not suitable to develop web services. Currently everything Legal Aid Board wants to implement has to be developed twice; once for the back-end applications and once for the front end (web portal). This means also doubling the volume of maintenance. Legal Aid Board is also using JBoss for application development, which is part of the current infrastructure. In order to prevent further lock-in, Legal Aid Board’s open standards/open source policy has become stricter since the adoption of JBoss application server as development platform. Legal Aid Board’s current main business application is built on Ingres. Legal Aid Board wants to rebuild it with new features and under the policy mentioned. — Website and portal. Legal Aid Board wants to direct more traffic to the website. The web portal is currently being developed. In the future the back-end applications should be integrated with the front-end. Moreover, Legal Aid Board would want to go even a step further. It should be possible to integrate the front-end also with the applications of the solicitors and mediators, and possibly other parties. And last, but not least, Legal Aid Board could offer applications to the customer of its customers, the litigant. Some examples include `Rechtwijzer’ (www.rechtwijzer.nl) and ´Echtscheidings- en ouderschapsplan´ as online services for the customer. 10. Integration of several processes in the organization: — Reduction of databases. Legal Aid Board currently has five databases for the same main business application. Integration of these fivedatabases into one database is a requirement. The question to be answered is: in which way can we do this best? — Rebuilding the main application. During the development of the new application the shop must be open and the business has to go on. Legal Aid Board wants an incremental development, step by step, that is accepted and deployed to production. This incremental development is necessary to keep the business going. The project should be divided into stages. These stages should be divided in small steps, but these steps should be as big as possible. This is to ensure that results are achieved in a short time and that these results build upon each accomplished stage. Thus, the second stage will build upon the results of the first stage, within a short period of time. The time window between two results should not exceed 6 months. — Adding other processes. Legal Aid Board is also managing some other processes, which are using different business applications on a different platform (in this case Oracle). These processes should be integrated in the main application. Concerning the price. 11. Price is always a concern in procurement, and what could be a “good” price for Legal Aid Board may depend upon various elements. The first issue is, clearly, the budget allocated to the project by Legal Aid Board. Then it is important to notice that most of the previous goals will affect, directly or indirectly, the management-maintenance costs of the new system and its life-cycle expenses. As a consequence, evaluation of an appropriate “base (reserve) price” and a “convenient” purchasing price should be based on these considerations.

IDEA (Innovation on behalf of the Digital future of the Enterprise Architecture of RvR).

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