Provision of Onsite IT support services for the WHO Berlin Office

Item Description:

The World Health Organization (WHO) intends to identify potential suppliers and to gather ideas from industry for delivering onsite IT support services for the WHO Berlin Office.

This RFI will serve to conduct market research to identify firms capable of providing solutions for the above stated requirement. This market research shall be conducted at NO COST TO WHO. Suppliers may be requested, as part of this RFI, to present to WHO their product or service.

This announcement is a Request for Information (RFI), not a solicitation for offers, and accordingly, no contract will be awarded from this announcement. Vendors responses, as a result of this announcement, shall focus on providing recommendations for the requirements as detailed below and/or in the attached Specific Requirements Document. Information provided in the RFI may be used by WHO in solicitation documents.

WHO appreciates your assistance with this market research and emphasizes that this effort is for planning purposes only. Responses will not be treated as proposals but may be used to create any subsequent Request for Proposal (RFP) / Invitation to Bid (ITB).

Background information

The WHO Berlin office is located in Kreuzberg and is composed of Office space from the 1^st floor to the 4^th floor, a collaborative open space on the 5^th floor, and a meeting centre on the ground floor.

This office is in its start-up phase and is expected to have about a hundred permanent users by Q4 and host visitors as well. Its IT services are mainly relying on remote infrastructure and corporate systems managed from WHO Head Quarters, hosted on-premises in a European location or in the Cloud. The infrastructure deployed onto the site is minimalistic and the first level user support is handled remotely offshore. The equipment being deployed onsite is standard. So are the operating procedures to commission, maintain and decommission equipment or services. All workload is managed via WHO ticketing system.

Requirements:

Local Technical Focal Point

Internally, the Local IT Support is expected to be a cornerstone of the IT set up, by acting as a technical focal point for IT stakeholders for this office. Although the vendor would have a direct reporting into the local management, it would be functionally reporting into the IT department of the Head Quarters in Geneva and be considered as an extension of the IT staff. The integration of the vendor into our IT ecosystem would include privileged access to IT system and information, and the ways of working would need to integrate WHO IT standards and follow standard operating procedures (SOP). The local IT support is expected to be the focal point for a large umbrella of IT counter parts from the WHO organization, spanning for instance service owners, IT support, or procurement.

Externally, the local IT support is also expected to be the primary focal point for all local IT providers such as Telecom service provider, or resellers/manufacturers for instance. Beyond IT stakeholders, the local it support is also the technical focal point for all parties who require some IT support locally, would it be a security or Audio/Video providers, or anything else. It is the local entry point for most of the IT inquiries for corporate or local services.

Finally, the local IT support embodies the IT department for WHO users and visitors, including those working remotely but based in Berlin.

It is worth noting that due to the international nature of WHO, the local support must be fluent in both German and English.

Hardware Support

Hardware support represents the core of the local IT Support. It folds in three parts depending on the type of equipment: infrastructure, workplace, and personal equipment.

Personal equipment and service

The local IT Support is expected to manage personal equipment through the entire life cycle. Personal equipment includes mainly laptops, mobile phones, headsets, and related accessories. This responsibility includes but is not limited to the following tasks: DOA check, unpack, store, (re)stage, deploy, hands on troubleshooting, repair defective parts, RMA, data back-up and recovery, destruction of legacy storage HW. The responsibility of inventory and safety stocks is part of the scope of support.

To effectively manage the fleet of equipment, the local IT support is also expected to handle local services for commissioning and maintaining the devices, operating system, and corporate applications by the means of central end point configuration manager and/or mobile device management systems (e.g. SCCM or Intunes), and/or GPO.

Workspace equipment and services

As for personal equipment, the local IT support is responsible for the hardware support of the workplace equipment for their entire life cycle. It must therefore undertake the (de)commissioning and maintenance of the equipment including connectivity and patching. Standard workplace equipment currently includes displays, docking stations, wireless keyboards and mice, and a webcam.

Moreover, each of the 5 floors have meeting rooms or trolleys where standard unified communication Cisco equipment is deployed for users to connect virtually to video conferences using mainstream cloud services such as MS Teams or Zoom. Such equipment includes for instance TV screens, codec, cameras, speakers, and microphones. Their design is driven to allow users to consume the services on a self-service basis and minimize the need for local support. The services are also managed centrally and remotely.

Nonetheless, local IT support maybe required for how-to-questions or hands-on troubleshooting. Besides, local service management maybe required such as administrating the room booking system.

Infrastructure equipment and services

While the Berlin office is designed to primarily leverage remote infrastructure and services managed centrally, there are core components that are required locally in the IT dedicated technical rooms. The role of the local IT support is therefore to complement back-end engineering teams managing the infrastructure remotely (Network, Unified Communication, etc.) for the commissioning, maintenance and decommissioning of infrastructure elements. Most of the activity relates to racking, patching, testing. Yet, some configuration may also be required. They could also cover hands-on troubleshooting tasks in coordination with remote engineers. Finally, the local IT support is responsible to make regular visual control of the server rooms.

User support

Although most of the user support activities are expected to take place for hardware related issues, the local IT support may need to handle incidents for software related issues within the scope of corporate services. The first level support for such issues is handled remotely by a global service desk. Yet, the local IT support maybe required to take part into the incident resolution, where resolution cannot be achieved only remotely, with the support of second level support or service owners remotely.

Surge support

Surge support is referring to extraordinary need for IT support locally. It could be either requiring more capacity within the above scope of support, or require additional skills set falling out of the regular scope of support. For instance, a capacity surge would occur when a specific event is expected to host a large audience of participants that would require the support to scale.  On the other hand, a specific project may require specific skills and a dedicated resource maybe required for the duration of the project.

Conferencing services

In opposition to the unified communication standard and mainstream services mentioned in the Workspace section above, the meeting rooms of the ground floor are expected to deliver “white glove” services based on specific high-end audio video (AV) equipment delivering a mix of onsite, virtual and hybrid capabilities. Events could gather between 20 and 200 people at once. Up to 4 different events, hosting each up to 40 people, could take place at the same time.

Those services and related infrastructure have not yet been defined. Although there will be some integration between the IT and AV infrastructure and services, there may also be a need for supporting events leveraging AV operator expertise or conciergerie. It may be considered as an optional scope of support for the local IT Support.

Documents

RFI 2022_052_BOS_WHO_Berlin Hub_IT_Support .docx