Canada Soccer IT/Digital Infrastructure Current State Assessment and Needs Analysis

REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL

Canada Soccer IT/Digital Infrastructure Current State Assessment and Needs Analysis

Canada Soccer is currently seeking a consultant to undertake an analysis of our information technology and digital infrastructure.

Deliverable: Present a current-state assessment and produce a 5-year roadmap for an integrated solution covering all aspects of our business operations including staffing and SLA recommendations.

Scope of work: VOIP/VPN, housed and cloud and email server administration, intranet, finance and accounting solutions, warehouse, learning, video and digital asset management leveraged through the development of web hosted application solution culminating in a website re-development for all stakeholders.

Background: Canada Soccer is in a transformational period. With a renewed focus on improving the technical aspects of our operations, we will begin by assessing our ability to serve our stakeholders through state-of-the-art delivery methods for services. At the same time, we must consider the implications to our day-to-day solutions on the IT and digital side of business and assess whether a bundled or a la carte system of infrastructure is best all the while cognizant that integrations between the solutions is a must.

Locations: Ottawa (head office), Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver

Project Overview:

The consultant will be required to:

• Recommend a sustainable centralised management approach that combines the needs of the organisation and identifies the IT pathway, architecture, and structure including server hosting maintenance and 24/7 support;
• Recommend best practices to better leverage existing hardware/software platforms currently in use; · Review and establish what existing platforms are currently in use, including present contract timelines and migration strategies;
• Recommend potential upgrades and/or replacement systems where necessary based upon the operational requirements of the organization as well as establish a process of platform redundancy elimination; and
• Establish a framework of the policies, procedures and training model required for the transformation to succeed.

Operational Requirements:

• Solutions should be scalable over the next 5 years to allow the integration of our membership and provide them with a turnkey operation if they wish to pick from the menu of services we provide; and
• Solutions require recommended Support Level Agreements including 24/7 maintenance and support availability.

Overview of current-state service/infrastructure identified to date:

• VOIP IP/VPN for both internal communication, between the head office and our satellite office in Toronto, as well as external communication to our Membership and the public at large;
• Multiplatform cloud based email solution including data backup and restoration;
• Migration of existing internal file server/shares to the cloud (i.e. global access, versioning, indexing, security, backup and restoration);
• Multiplatform online meeting/teleconferencing solution for both team collaboration and committee work;
• Sage Accounting instance;
• e-Commerce solution that is scalable to allow for a variety of user permissions for the creation, management, payment and funds distribution adhering to our current accounting codes;
• Content Management Solution for online management and distribution of organizational information, news, national team profiles and data, preferably open source, integrated with a suite of multi-user, third-party integrations to cover form building, online voting, customer feedback, etc. integrated with person data management solution.
• Statistical Data Management Solution to track the player/coach/match official/ event data from our National Team and Development streams for web presentation and posterity;
• Person Data Management Solution integrated with third party e-mail marketing solution to track person data and provide a 360 view of our relationship with all stakeholders, hosted in Canada;
• Player Registration and Movement solution integrated with a global player, coach and referee database;
• Digital Asset Management Solution for hosting and sharing video and photo assets with internal and external stakeholders;
• Video Content Management Solution for serving and archiving video (including live streams) to various platforms including web, mobile and set top platforms and applications;
• Learning Management Solution to deliver coach and referee education components integrated with a variety of databases both internal and external integrated with other learning modules and the national certification body;
• Web Analytics Suite to track online engagement deployed on all Canada Soccer web platforms and various external platforms (i.e. Ticketmaster, Magento webstore, etc.);
• Media Monitoring Service agreement for mainstream media and social media monitoring and reporting; and
• National teams’ athlete development and progress tracking digital platform.

Proposals should be forwarded to Joe Guest, Deputy General Secretary, Canada Soccer, (jguest@canadasoccer.com) and should include details of previous project summaries and an overview of the project staff with competencies.

Proposals must be received no later than 11:59 p.m. ET 31 March 2017

The initial assessment is required to be complete no later than 12 May 2017 with the recommendations presented on a timeline to be agreed at program launch.