We’ve been planning for a long time that the best option for solidifying our web presence was to start completely from scratch and essentially « start over ».

To achieve this vision, we knew we could not adapt our desires to the processes or infrastructure that we currently have and has been in place since 2008. We would have to start with a blank canvas or blank slate and build everything from scratch exactly as we need now and to achieve these goals for the future.

To that end, we secured an investment offer from the organization last year to help us realize that vision, part of which is the procurement of a platform and associated infrastructure.

We need to slice our content and focus on making it available to multiple endpoints however our users demand. It could be as simple as viewing a website on a mobile device or requesting specific information with Alexa/Siri or having specific updates/information available in your car or TV.

Of course, it’s not just about the platform, there are various other aspects of vision that we need to address. Everything from CDN usage to image optimizers, SEO and personalization, and indeed the culture of our organization.

Rather than keep trying to build more and more extensions on top of previous extensions (and there are many!), we have decided to build on a new plot and build with a solid foundation so that there will be no need for extensions anytime soon.

But enough of the analogies…

We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about our requirements and what we’re looking for from this procurement process. One of the things that we hope will be helpful in helping potential suppliers is to understand some of the problems we are currently facing and the problems we are trying to solve. Some are technical limitations and others are our processes.

These scenarios are included in the call for tenders available for download Public Procurement Scotland.

Our tender is now public and we would welcome input from any vendors who believe their solutions can help us realize our bold vision. Any questions should be directed to Procurement via Government Procurement Scotland.