At the heart of the delivery of the authority's end-to-end ICT services is the Service Desk which will act a single point of contact and support the authority's business units, end-users and other Unity suppliers in enabling the authority's core business.

The Service Desk will play a significant role in supporting the authority's service management function to achieve its goal of ensuring the services delivered to its end-users are fit for purpose and fit for use.

To express an interest in this tender and obtain the procurement documentation navigate to the following URL

https://defra.bravosolution.co.uk/web/login.html

The Service Desk will be provided to Defra and other organisations in the Defra Group including, the Environment Agency (EA), Natural England (NE), Rural Payments Agency (RPA), Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) and Marine Management Organisation (MMO).

The current incumbent service desk providers deliver services to both Defra and the Environment Agency across 371 sites in the UK, of which 161 are offices, 131 stores or depots. The service is to be made available to 21 000 staff across the UK.

Other Defra affiliated organisations that may choose to take services under the proposed contract at a later date and would be considered to be in scope organisations can be found via the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-environment-food-rural-affairs

For the avoidance of doubt this, Defra Group organisations and Defra affiliated organisations will be beneficiaries of this Service Desk Contract.

Defra Group are seeking a Supplier for the provision of a Service Desk, operating 24 hours a day 7 days a week, including UK bank holidays through which end-users of the authority's ICT services can direct incidents, raise service requests, and seek guidance.

The Service Desk will play a significant role in supporting the authority's service management function to achieve its goal of ensuring the services delivered to its end-users are fit for purpose and fit for use.

The Supplier when delivering Services Desk services shall help drive maximisation of First Time Fix resolving incidents as early as possible and help assist the authority in moving end-users to the most cost effective contact channel that fulfils their ICT needs, in particular, self-help articles facilitated via a central self-service portal.

The Service Desk Supplier shall;

— act as the single point of contact for end users and other Authority ICT suppliers and manage and be responsible for the following on behalf of the authority;

— incident management;

— major incident management;

— problem management;

— request fulfilment;

— access management;

— reporting and trend analysis;

— provide first contact resolution;

— propagate shift left opportunities;

— interact and participate with other ITIL processes;

— continual service improvement and innovation;

— on boarding new services/suppliers and off boarding incumbent services/suppliers to the service desk function;

— manage day-to-day communications with end users and other Authority ICT suppliers;

— provide help and guidance on the Authority's IT services.

The authority currently has 3 independent service desks and each will be transitioned to the one single point of contact Service Desk. At the point of the new Service Desk Supplier taking on the services for each of the desks all 3 service desks will have transitioned to the Authority's Service Now toolset.

The Supplier shall be responsible for providing the physical Service Desk facility and local IT infrastructure and provide connectivity to the authority network for the remote access to the authority systems and first contact resolution tools in scope of the suppliers responsibility to enable remote support for end — users, and will require internet connectivity to access the SaaS Service Now.

The ITSM toolset (IT Service Management) which has been procured separately by the authority, includes features which support end user empowerment such as self-service and also tools which broaden the contact channels including web chat. The Service Desk provider will be mandated to utilise the authority provided ITSM toolset.