Home Office Biometrics (HOB) - Strategic Central and Bureau Platforms

The Home Office (Contracting Authority) provides the biometric capability to deliver enrolment, matching, storage & reporting of fingerprints & facial images through two legacy systems; IDENT1 for UK police forces & law enforcement & IABS for immigration, the border force & HMPO. Both contracts expire in 2019.

Significant parts of these systems have already been disaggregated such as the Strategic Matcher functionality; other will follow (such as Front End Equipment, Mobile, Bureau Application & Tools and Interfaces (Biometric Services Gateway).

The Authority is procuring an IT Services contract for significant subsystems within the IDENT1 & IABS systems. These subsystems already exist & have been operational for over 10 years. The successful bidder will be required to carry out the transition of these services from the incumbent suppliers into the new operating model.

The SCBP project will provide the core platform delivering business aware workflow, process management and databases the heart of the future Biometric Service.

The existing and implemented subsystems within scope for SCBP shall include but not be limited to: • Front End Equipment Front end equipment providing users with the ability to capture finger print biometrics, search them against, and add them to the existing data sets for a number of business purposes. • Bureaux providing the capabilities for finger print experts to manage the biometric workflows, and intervene when errors need to be corrected. • The Central IDENT1 and IABS subsystems housing the statically defined national collections; and the flexibly defined 'special collections'. These provide the ability for appropriate users to manage records, search collections and be notified of changes.

For these already built and running subsystems the SCBP Supplier shall provide IT services that include, but not be limited to: • Application support and maintenance • Infrastructure support services, including working with the existing data centre provisioning and network supply; • Security support services; • ITIL Service Management as part of the wider ecosystem; • Development, testing and deployment of continuous improvement and enhancements. This will be commissioned in support of the known pipeline of work.

There are also Transformation requirements which may be taken up during the term of the contract:- • Data centre consolidation. Relocation away from the existing four IDENT1 and IABS Production Data Centres into two Crown Hosting data centres and/or migration of both IDENT1 and IABS applications into the public Cloud; • Transformation of the highly distributed physical deployment architecture for Bureaux to a centralised and virtualised solution; • Alignment and integration of the Service and Security Management Tooling in line with established strategies.

Full information, including how to apply for this opportunity, can be found in the Contract Notice reference 2018/S 055-121962 dated 20th March 2018.