RFP 07-19

Vendor Questionnaire – Attachment “B”

Company Background:

1. Company Name:      

2. Identify the individual in your company who will be our contact throughout the evaluation process. Please include name, title, address, phone and FAX numbers and e-mail address.      

3. Briefly describe your company’s history, qualifications and structure.

     

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Product/Solution:

1. Please provide a description of what product/solution your company could provide to achieve the described Kent County IT goal.      

2. Please provide a price quote for all items and costs associated with the proposed solution. Identify any cost items (shipping, handling, etc) that may occur but are not included in the pricing quote.     

3. Do you have a history with providing a solution for this type of project? Please explain.

     

4. How many companies are actively using your Service Desk solution(s)?      

5. When was the last major release of your Service Desk solution(s)? How often are updates released? What is your Software Control & Distribution process?      

6. What are the known issues still outstanding if we implemented today? (what couldn’t we do?)      

7. What external (other Vendor) Knowledge and/or self-help tools can your solution integrate with?      

8. When did your company develop their Service Desk Solution?      

9. What percentage of the market is currently utilizing your Service Desk Solution?      

10. Does your Service Desk Solution integrate with PeopleSoft?      

11. What type of search engine does your Service Desk Solution use?      

12. What application and database platforms can your Service Desk Solution run on?      

13. How are customers notified when product updates are available?      

14. Are customers notified regarding Known Issues as they are discovered?      

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General Information:

1. Please provide a list of current clients and former clients. We would like to contact these people directly, if possible.      

2. Please supply any IT or Retail industry analysis completed on either your company or your products (white papers, analytical reports, META, GIGA, GARTNER, FMI etc).      

3. Kent County IT may want to do a site visit of your product being used at a CLIENT’S site. Can you arrange an event like this? (yes / no): <select>

4. Please outline your pricing models and supply list pricing for products associated within the context of this project.      

5. What type of training (technical, support, end user etc.) do you provide on your products?      

6. Do you provide direct consulting and/or contracting service for this type of project? If not, do you work with a third party to provide this? If so, who?      

7. Does your company provide 24x7 support for customer issues?      

8. What forums exist to discuss specific business needs with Vendor Executives?      

9. Does your company provide any Customer Satisfaction Survey feedback to its customers?      

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Tell Us More :

1. Please use this space to tell us more about your company. Take this opportunity to share any other related information with us would you like us to know about you.      

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Feature requirements:

1. Describe how your product provides for custom configuration requirements in terms of changes to delivered components or adding new fields, forms, and custom views. (Kent County will want to add additional fields, forms, views to support our processes):

     

2. Describe how your product might help document and track detailed work activities related to planned/unplanned changes to Kent County production IT assets (i.e. application changes, server replacements, etc…):

     

3. Can the product capture both estimated and actual labor hours for a specific work request?

     

4. Document the workflow capabilities of your product:

     

5. Does your product support configuration of custom workflow processes?

     

6. Can your product be configured to notify a resource upon assignment of a work request?

     

7. Can your product be configured to notify a list of people upon completion of a work request?

     

8. Can your product be configured to support various levels of approval workflow processing?

     

9. Describe how your product can provide a consolidated view of all work requests assigned to an employee or a specific work group.

     

10. Does your product support the creation of standard templates for documenting common work activities that can be used to initiate new work requests?

     

11. Please detail your future product development/roadmap plans and timeline (e.g. planned enhancements, new products, changes in development platform, etc.):

     

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12. List all types of assets that can be tracked in your IT asset management solution:

     

13. Document the information tracked for each IT asset.

     

14. Describe the capabilities that your asset management system provides for creating relationships between assets.

     

15. How do you track the lifecycle of assets through your asset management system?

     

16. List the financial details that can be captured in your asset management system.

     

17. Can additional fields, forms, and/or views be added to support custom processes?

     

18. Describe your Incident Management solution’s customizable escalation model.

     

19. Can you make copies of incident tickets or change tickets?

     

20. Does your product support the creation of standard templates for documenting common work activities that can be used to initiate new incidents or changes?

     

21. Explain your product’s ability to tie multiple work orders to incidents or changes:

     

22. Describe the logging and auditing capabilities provided within your product for capturing changes made to incidents, assets, and changes:

     

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Software:

1. List all OEM and non-OEM 3rd party products along with required versions in order to enable functionality of this software:

     

2. Identify the responsible technical support organization for all 3rd party products included with your software:

     

3. Identify any additional packages or utilities that are included out-of-the-box at no additional cost in excess of the base product:

     

4. List database architectures supported by the application for each applicable operating system platform:

     

5. Describe any document management capabilities provided with your product (i.e. check-in/check-out, versioning):

     

6. Document typical factors that have impacted performance of the product for different customers:

     

7. Document security features and capabilities of your product:

a. Identify all points where user authentication is required:

     

b. Document how your product can support security requirements based upon both an employee’s role and a company’s organizational breakdown structure:

     

c. Document how application security is managed within your product:

     

d. Document LDAP server integration capabilities for accessing user credentials (i.e. Microsoft Active Directory 2003, Novell Directory Services):

     

e. Document security capabilities for encrypting information flowing from the server to a browser client.

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Hardware:

1. Describe your suggested server hardware requirements specific to each of the following operating system platforms:

Microsoft Windows 2003:

     

SUSE Linux:

     

2. Document hardware virtualization technologies supported (i.e. VMware, Windows 2003 partitions):

     

3. Document your minimum and recommended client hardware requirements:

     

4. Document typical storage space requirements at go-live; after 12 months of recording actual data:

     

5. Document any issues with maintaining historical data in order to provide a knowledge base:

     

6. Describe metrics commonly used to assess hardware and storage requirements:

     

7. Describe the scalability options available for each platform to support future growth:

     

8. Provide statistics that indicate the typical impact to network utilization:

     

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Implementation:

1. Document a typical implementation project for your product:

a. List which modules are generally part of any initial implementation.

     

b. Document a typical implementation time line.

     

2. Identify any formal product training required prior to beginning an implementation project.

     

3. Document common pitfalls and unforeseen problems encountered by your customers.

     

4. Document any available implementation services provided by your company and provide associated advantages.

     

5. Provide a typical preliminary implementation strategy and associated timeline.

     

6. Identify any certified implementation partners that can be leveraged during implementation.

     

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Administration:

1. Describe the management, monitoring, and tuning capabilities available of your product.

     

2. Identify typical number of resources needed to support the on-going administration and support of your product.

     

3. Identify formal training requirements and other skills required to administer your product.

     

4. Identify all formal training options (i.e. formal classroom, on-site at customer) and typical costs.

     

5. Describe available technical support programs and features.

     

6. Identify costs and provisions for providing on-site support if necessary.

     

7. Does your product ship with a data dictionary/reporting data model to assist with developing ad-hoc reports?

     

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Integration requirements:

1. Explain how your asset management tool integrates with your change and incident management system to allow you to relate asset items to associated incidents and changes.

     

2. Explain your Incident Management and Change Management modules capabilities to utilize GroupWise for automatic email notification:

     

3. Describe how your incident management, asset lifecycle management, and service management systems provide integration with internal products.

     

4. Can your Service Level Management and/or Change Management product tracks SLAs?

     

5. What hardware/software discovery tools integrate with your Asset management solution?

     

6. What abilities does your product have in regard to importing/exporting data from other databases or tools? (i.e. Excel)

     

7. Describe any wireless/mobile integration capabilities.

     

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Pricing:

Please respond to the following requests for licensing information:

1. Describe all product licensing options:

a. Document licensing model for products and related pricing tier for each product solution:

     

b. Provide estimated annual maintenance costs:

     

2. Identify any additional license costs for any 3rd party products included with your product:

     

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Desired Features: Indicate whether the product contains desired features. Features that require explanations can be documented at the end of the list. (CHECK ONE)

Area Requirement Explanation Y NArchitecture GUI: Visualization of the process Real time visualization of database relationships

and business workflowsArchitecture usability: the overall ease of use

permitted by the user interfaceIntuitive feel to interface screens used for input to database and development of processes

Architecture Same interface for all apps All modules have similar look/feel functionalityArchitecture multi customer support within a

single appAllow different departmental structure tracking

Architecture Web browser client on desktop Availability of thin client, compatibility with Internet Explorer

Architecture GUI: Forms and query lists Wizards that allow creation/modification of custom forms and queries

Change Provide support for workflow of change management processes

As related to the process of RFC movement through the Change Management Approval process

Change automation support for change categorization

Based on selection of values from drop down menus with terms that describe various aspects of an RFC, determine a change category

Change automation support for change risk analysis

Based on selection of values from drop down menus with terms that describe various aspects of an RFC, determine a change risk value

Change automation support for change and release scheduling

Capability to examine the existing FSC, and determine/suggest when a planned change may be inserted into the FSC, must allow manual override

Change Auto-generation of a Forward Schedule of Changes (FSC)

For CAB, and for general use, a listing of planned changes, and when they are schedule to be implemented.

Change Allows capture of the relationship of Changes to CMDB CIs

Identifies CMDB CIs that are affected by a Change

Change Staff Availability Calendar, would also prompt when the tech was away for ticket assignment

Link with GroupWise calendar

Change automation support for impact analysis

Provide a means to identify an RFC Impact rating

Change automation support for change urgency analysis

Provide a means to identify an RFC Urgency rating

Change RFC input process Provide an ability to record Requests for Change (RFCs)

Change Record CAB Actions / Decisions Provide the ability to indicate CAB decisions

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Area Requirement Explanation Y NChange Calendar to schedule changes Related to generation of FSC, a Calendar for

Recording Changes

Change automation support for recording available maintenance windows

Related to the Calendar function, the ability to designate when certain categories of changes are permitted to occur.

Change Support for aggregating changes into releases

The capability to link one or more changes either for convenience, or due to dependency(s)

Change Provide capability to export data to other systems/tools

This capability would facilitate a conversion, migration, and / or "Best of Breed" approach

Change Provide capability to import data from other systems/tools, such as retrieval from SNMP system

This capability would facilitate a conversion, migration, and / or "Best of Breed" approach, Simple Network Management Protocol integration to support automated detection of changes

Change Allows capture of the relationship of Changes to Incidents and vice versa

Two key relationships: 1) Changes that address one or more incidents, 2) Incidents caused by changes, Dynamically link incidents to a change request.

Change Allows capture of the relationship of Changes to Problems and Vice versa

Two key relationships: 1) Changes to address one or more Problems, 2) Problems caused by changesWhen configuration changes are made, would need to associate problems caused by the change.

Configuration create relationships between CIs Manually create links between CIsConfiguration What ability is there to discover

CIs?Desktops, servers, switches, routers... What protocol is used? Is the protocol compatible with other discovery tools? Which ones?

Configuration integrate with AD/Edirectory Directory based integration may link to logon security and role based administration.

Configuration business-driven not technology driven

integrates with Service Catalog, Knowledgebase, and SLA

Configuration ability to define a relationship physical or logical typesConfiguration create a service orientated map

of CIs based on relationshipsThe CMDB tool must be able to relate CIs to multiple services and to report on the CIs related to a given service.

Configuration role based administration This is the ability of some roles (users) to view data and other roles to change certain data.

Configuration ability to auto populate CI attributes - either with a built in tool or an external tool

We are looking at the flexibility of the data import function. This feature is also related to the CI discovery feature.

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Area Requirement Explanation Y NConfiguration link all change / incident /

problem tickets to a CIWe are looking for the ability to search incidents, problems and changes by CI or by service.

Configuration search capabilities We need to evaluate the flexibility and ease of use of a free form search function for any attribute

General Auto refresh date modified if status update is entered

Whenever a modification/addition is made to a record, the last modified date reflects the current date

General FAQ section for users Knowledge base has a method to create and display FAQs

General Impact/urgency matrix A matrix that reflects the definitions of impact and urgency codes

General manual escalation The ability to escalate an incident through notifications and assignment to an individual or group manually

General multiple roles for a technician

A technician can be a member of more than one role/security group.

General Notification for new ticket, work order, to the client, past due notices

Email notification to client whenever a new assignment has been received from the client or whenever an assignment is past due for completion

General notification sent for escalation

Email notification to the technician whenever an escalation has been made that requires the technician’s attention.

General preconfigured wizards that guide configuration

Does the product contain wizard software that enables ease of configuration and design

General real time reporting of escalations

Query all current escalations that are in effect

General resizable windows Able to resize query result windows and columns on the fly

General user security/permissions Role based securityGeneral Future growth for multi

vendor componentsintegration of multi-vendor infrastructure components, and the need to absorb new components in the future - these will place particular demands on the data handling and modeling capabilities of the tool

General announcement area banner announcement on technicians screens and user screens

General Excellent report generation. What tools are provided to create reports? What are the licensing requirements for the reporting tool?

General back-up, control and security provisions

database/application, user access security

General adherence of tool and supplier to ITIL best practices

Is the tool Pink verified? Acknowledged by Gartner?

General a sound data structure and handling

Oracle or SQL, data structure, data handling, and integration

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Area Requirement Explanation Y NGeneral business rules control simple construction, unlimited, customizableGeneral distributed clients with a

centralized shared databasesupport single sign on to LDAP compliant directory

General Recurring ticket templates Templates for incidents that recurGeneral self service tool web basedGeneral ability to interact with system

management monitoring toolswhat's up gold, cacti, nagios

Incident ability to assign to a group Ability to assign incidents to a role based group of technicians

Incident ability to assign to an individual Ability to assign incidents to an individualIncident assignment configured via

business rulesAbility to automatically assign incidents to an individual or a group of technicians using workflow automation

Incident assignment to individuals based on workload

Ability to automatically assign incidents to a technician based on the workload of all registered technician resources

Incident audit trail Ability to provide, via reporting or query, the history of an incident which includes system processes applied to the incident

Incident automatically populate form with requester's asset info

Incident form will automatically populate with client’s asset information when client name is selected

Incident Automatically populate form with requester's info

Incident form will automatically populate with client’s personal information when client name is selected

Incident integration to network management systems

Ability to view monitored network systems whenever an open incident is selected.

Incident Life Cycle Asset Inventory in Service Desk

Ability to view the asset inventory within the incident management form

Incident Life Cycle Service Desk in Change Management

Ability to view the history of changes associated with the selected incident

Incident manage multiple requesters about same problem or resolution

The ability to update multiple incidents that report the same problem simultaneously.

Incident Open multiple incidents or problems at one time

View all incidents associated with a problem simultaneously.

Incident Change color of past due tickets "Dashboard" query tailoring/customizingIncident Time reporting of hours of effort

expended to close the incidentAbility to calculate real time labor effort of hours spent to resolve incident

Incident ability to relate SLA performance metrics with auto alert/escalate

Business rules tailoring for auto alert/escalation?

Incident intelligent assignments Can system automatically assign to the "designated" staff or make suggestions based on the subject?

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Area Requirement Explanation Y NIncident set default group for ticket

assignment; better promptsCan techs be divided into groups for incident/problem assignment? Is there a default group?

Incident ability to relate incidents to CIs

Clients, customers, groups, techs

Incident Automatically update tickets/incidents via email.

Correspondence by email is often used to communicate updates etc.  If the tool can be "included" in these correspondences, it would alleviate retyping updates from email into the incident system. 

Incident ability to relate incidents to problems and vice versa

Dynamically link incidents to a problem? Know when incidents become a problem.

Incident ability to relate incidents to each other

Peer to Peer

Incident Filter for ticket type based on urgency

supports user interface logic

Incident Versatile composition features and options.

The tool should go beyond input of simple straight text.  Most modern applications we use allow some freedom of composition.  GroupWise for instance allows us to compose our emails in HTML with bullets, text formatting and friendly URL handling.

Incident /Problem known error database tracking

Know what known errors exist, what they relate to, who is working on them, and when and how they are resolved. ; with links to problems and incidents

Knowledgebase browse resolutions and view incidents and problems resolved by them

Search resolutions by word or phrase to view incidents and problems affected

Knowledgebase browse resolutions based on topics

Search categories by word or phrase to view incidents and problems affected

Knowledgebase save new resolutions created by technicians

Ability to update resolution records within knowledgebase as new information becomes available

Knowledgebase save searches of knowledgebase

Ability to save/store queries of the knowledgebase that can be retrieval for reuse

Knowledgebase A Useful knowledge base tool for techs to search; by word/phrase/incident #/known error, one that we can update

Searchable by word and phrase using natural language that would allow us to research problems that occur. This could be done in real-time while on the service desk. This could be maintained and supplied by way of our Service Desk incident management tool but may not necessarily be limited by this. For instance, Problem Management could use a form to search for known errors and workarounds and permanent resolutions to those known errors.

Problem predefined procedures for problem resolution

Ability to update problem resolution from known error database.

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Area Requirement Explanation Y NProblem ability to document

problem resolutionStore and retrieve how problems are solved. This information to be used in a knowledge base for future reference

Problem assignment of problem number

The product allows problems to be assigned and reassigned to staff members

Reporting Easily customizable; queries

Provide wizards to create multilevel queries and reports

Reporting embedded reporting included in Apps

Internal reporting tool usable with product without additional licensing

Reporting Graphical decision support reporting

Real time visualization while configuring desired reports

Reporting reporting on change activity per periods

Ability to list all changes that occurred within a specific time period

Reporting Provide reporting on changes

Historical reporting (rather than FSC), by type, by service, by individual, success, per period (e.g. weekly/monthly/annual), ad hoc and pre-defined

Reporting Provide for the capture of appropriate metrics

Partial list: Successful versus non-successful, elapsed time from initiation of an RFC to implementation, Number of changes by CI, by Service, by User Organization, by individual, Number of CIs by Change, by month, by quarter, by year; emergency changes, etc

Reporting Provide input to CAB process (e.g. Proposed FSC)

Provide the ability to produce a report for the CAB of Requested/Proposed Changes, including all appropriate details about the Changes (risk, impact, related changes, etc.)

Reporting reporting on incident activity by type per periods

Reporting by category

Reporting Multi - criteria queries Wizard that creates a query with more than one criteria levelsService User satisfaction

survey areaability to automatically generate and send user surveys based on service and KPIs

Service support for a service catalog

ability to define service as a CI that links to assets using service

Service regular and on-demand performance reporting against SLA

ability to select survey and incident reporting against SLA measurements

Service identification and recording of KPI

record KPI on service catalog record

Service support for availability management

service availability tracking

Service support for capacity planning / monitoring

service capacity projection and tracking

Service support for continuity planning

support for service continuity

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