IT Consultancy Services in the Areas of Application Development to Support Thematic Data Products to the European Environment Agency and the European Commission (DG ENV)

Item Description:

The European Environment Agency (EEA) is a European Union public body. The EEA role is to support the European Union in the development and implementation of environmental policy by providing relevant, reliable, targeted, and timely information on the state of the environment and future prospects. The EEA also provides the necessary independent scientific knowledge and technical support to enable the Union and the member countries to take appropriate measures to protect and improve the environment as laid down in the Treaty and by successive Union action programmes on the environment and sustainable development. Currently, the EEA has 32 member countries and six cooperating countries in the Western Balkans.

Further information about the work of EEA can be obtained on its website: https://www.eea.europa.eu/.

Subject of the contract

The EEA, as leading contracting authority, is planning to award the public contract resulting from the above inter-institutional procurement procedure. The procurement documents consist of the contract notice, the invitation letter, the draft contract and tender specifications with their respective annexes. All documents are available in the attached ZIP File.

The EEA, as leading contracting authority for the purpose of this inter-institutional call for tenders, seeks to establish a framework service contract with an experienced service provider who will assist it and the European Commission, Directorate-General for Environment (DG ENV) as participating contracting authority, by providing IT consultancy services in the areas of application development to support thematic data products.

Description of the services

The EEA is responsible for developing, implementing and operating approximately one hundred spatial and tabular data flows in which Member States report data to the EEA. When data have been successfully delivered to the EEA, the data are processed in various steps and eventually disseminated for further use. Services required by DG ENV will be performed in close cooperation with EEA. EEA and DG ENV co-own the referred systems, though EEA is responsible for infrastructure and day-to-day operation. The dataflows and services implemented in EEA are highly automated, though continuous maintenance and support are required to ensure a smooth operation.

In order to ensure a long-term continuity within the EEA, the future contractor will be required to organise training sessions to make EEA staff confident with the software packages and frameworks, within the scope of this contract, depending on the needs.

The EEA has established the Common Workspace (CWS) where consultants are given remote desktop access to a common IT infrastructure, including both virtual servers and software. The Common Workspace will be a fundamental element for the future contractor for the performance of the framework contract.

Several software packages are used on premises. These include FME (Safe), ArcGIS Server/Desktop/Online (Esri), Tableau, Microsoft SQL Server, Python and C#. For certain processing of data, cloud computing (Microsoft Azure) is increasingly used, particular Azure Data Warehouse, Databricks, blob storage, Azure SQL are part of the EEA infrastructure.

EEA operates around one hundred dataflows on which member states are required to report environmental data and information. Dataflows are closely operated in cooperation with the EEA thematic experts and cover air, water, emission, climate, biodiversity etc. This inter-institutional call for tenders covers consultancy services to develop products which support the delivery of dataflows using webforms, or in the development of products and applications based on those dataflows.

Expert support is needed to develop robust and automated IT solutions which can deliver maintainable products in a consistent manner on the EEA infrastructure.

Main services and tasks/deliverables

This list of tasks covers the main areas of service required but is not exhaustive. The tasks and deliverables will be specified in more detail in each specific contract.

• Maintain and continuous development of existing thematic data products, including bug-fixing
• Operational support
• Develop web-based Intranet data product applications
• Develop data warehouse and visualisation tools
• Develop database reporting and integration
• Develop and design well performing systems for data processing
• Develop mobile apps (Android and iOS)

Download all available documents in: [ZIP]