RFI – Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence Technologies
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NOTICE TO VENDOR
ALAMEDA COUNTY SOCIAL SERVICES AGENCY (ACSSA)
REQUEST FOR INTEREST (RFI)
FY 2007 - 2008
Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence Technologies
RFI RESPONSE DEADLINE
May 16, 2008
3:00 P.M.
Friday,
At
ACSSA / Contracts Office
2000 San Pablo Ave. 4th Floor
Oakland, CA 94612
Attn: Kathy Chen
Or
E-Mail to:
For further information regarding this project see RFI posted at:
http://www.acgov.org/jsp_app/gsa/purchasing/bid_content/contractopportunities.jsp
AND
At the Social Services Agency (SSA) Website Under FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES:
http://www.alamedasocialservices.org/
To vendors registered or certified in the Small Local Emerging Business Vendor Database: Maintain correct and accurate e-mail address information to ensure receipt of future RFIs.
C:\Documents and Settings\NNEAL\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\OLK23\RFI - Data Warehouse Final (5-1-08).doc
RFI – Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence Technologies
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A. INTENT
The intent of the Business Intelligence RFI is to search for a qualified vendor, who can deliver a pre-configured fully balanced analytic data warehouse. Alameda County Social Services Agency (SSA) wishes to enhance its ability to link data sets with the goal of more fully understanding the inter-relationships between its programs and the dynamics that drive its caseloads and program outcomes. Consistent with this general goal, it has an immediate need to track in near real time, performance and progress of its Child Welfare 4-E Waiver program and its 2006 Deficit Reduction Act driven Client Work Participation Rate program. In addition to delivering the pre-configured modular architecture based data warehouse, the vendor is expected to conduct full knowledge transfer of all aspects of the system. SSA will own the finished product, as it will not be a service provided system. The system is expected to be fully customizable by SSA without the needed support of the vendor. The database system platform will be DB2 application (no exceptions). Furthermore, the system will support up to 250GB of raw data input. The system will have storage capacity initially of 1TB scalable to up to 20TB. The system will support a minimum of 200 defined users.
B. SCOPE
Background
Implementation of data warehouse and business intelligence technologies in a social services setting is an important next step in managing welfare client outcomes and improving overall business performance.
The amount of data accumulated and stored in social service organizations is extremely large and originates from many disparate sources. In the case of SSA, data originates from the child welfare systems (CWS/CMS), California Welfare Information system (CalWIN), and the Adult & Aging Program’s system (California Management Information Payrolling System - CMIPS). Data is also received from other state agencies such as the Employment Development Department, private and non-profit organizations, and the universities, other local government agencies and departments, and ad hoc systems and databases developed within the agency. The challenge is not obtaining data; the challenge is synthesizing all of this data into actionable information the SSA needs to maximize the effectiveness of its programs. Other challenges include reducing the tremendous human effort and time needed to extract and report out information derived from the different data sources.
In today’s environment, SSA must respond quickly to new challenges, and it requires a very high degree of confidence in its data. As noted above, SSA has identified two immediate needs and a large number of needs that will be addressed after the two described below.
The first immediate need is SSA Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) and Probation Departments (PD) participation in the Title IV-E Waiver. Title IV-E of the Social Security Act establishes:
· The Foster Care and Adoption Assistance programs for certain children who receive foster care services or subsidized adoption.
· Requirements for the states to follow in both administration and operation to receive federal support under the programs.
Under the Title IV-E program, each individual program is funded at different levels (or amounts of dollars). The aim of the waiver program is to utilize spending flexibility for a series of proactive reinvestment strategies to better direct financial resources away from expensive care and ineffective services to prevention, early intervention, and long-term support strategies that serve youth and their caretakers with engaging, cost effective, localized, familial, and neighborhood and mentor-based supports. It is incumbent upon SSA to fully understand the changes in cost, performance, and effectiveness of this strategic program on a real-time basis. The ability to understand performance respond quickly to positive or adverse affects of the waiver program is essential to its overall success.
The second highly visible near-term challenge is SSA’s response to the client work participation rate (WPR) requirements as set forth in the Deficit Reduction Act (DRA) of 2005. Under the Welfare Act of 1996, adults receiving assistance are expected to engage in work activities and develop the capability to support themselves before their time-limited assistance runs out. All states including California and subsequently Alameda County SSA are required to assist recipients in making the transition to employment. The DRA requires the state (and incumbent upon all counties) to meet the work participation rates and other critical program requirements in order to maintain their full Federal funding and avoid penalties. The target rate for California is fifty percent. Any county that does not meet the fifty percent target will contribute proportionally toward paying the states penalty.
In order to avoid paying penalty for not meeting the WPR requirement, SSA has taken aggressive steps to re-engineer its Employment programs. It uses systems and tools to track the progress of it clients and performance of its staff in an effort to successfully increase the rate of employment of per welfare recipient. Tracking clients from the moment they begin receipt of benefits, determining their eligibility for reentry into the work place, the various stages of work participation preparation is paramount to SSA’s meeting state requirements. The tools and services used have proven very effective and used extensively by management and staff. However these services are not owned by SSA and are specific in nature, they lack the timeliness and flexibility needed to fully address all the needs of the organization. The ability to know in near real-time the status of ever client in all stages of the WPR process is critical to the success meeting the state requirements and avoiding penalties. With immediate knowledge of this information, SSA can make the needed adjustments to the program in a more timely and effective manner.
General Scope of this Project
SSA is seeking those vendors with the demonstrated experience of developing Business Intelligence engines with analytic capability using DB2. Vendors must demonstrate they are capable of developing very user friendly, web enabled, fully balanced and fully scalable engines that incorporate strong Identity Resolution and Sequence Neutrality technologies.
General System Characteristics
The following are the characteristics expected in the development of the data warehouse: ease of use, high performance, and reliable, available, serviceable, scalable, flexible, durable, and simplified administration. In addition, the system must meet or exceed industry standards in processing power and throughput, and feature a high degree of analytics and reporting capability, it must manage workload increases and decreases effortlessly, and finally it must be very cost effective.
SSA is seeking simplicity in implementation, which for the agency means it is ready to receive raw data and begin functioning immediately. The system is ready to go upon delivery.
A single vendor is expected to build the entire data warehouse including the hardware, software, definition of the reports, build the data model and extract the data.
The vendor is also expected to transfer the knowledge of this system to SSA personnel. It is anticipated that upon delivery of the data warehouse and the knowledge transfer, the vendor will be engaged on an as needed basis.
It is anticipated that it will take no more than six (6) months from design, development, implementation, and knowledge transfer.
A separate maintenance agreement will also be negotiated with the selected vendor.
Specific Characteristics and System Requirements
SSA requires the data warehouse vendor to:
· Deliver software, hardware and storage environment that is pre-integrated, pre-configured, and tested for production, development and test.
· Utilize one suite of tools with a common development interface, administration interface, collaboration and teaming capabilities
· Support 250 gigabytes of raw data, 1.3 terabytes of usable data space, and
support up to 20 terabytes of usable data space after configuration
· Support 200 defined users, 100 concurrent users, and 10 power users
performing online analytical work
· Support in-warehouse data transformations, data mining and OLAP
· Support an incremental growth path of both capacity and data source and in
configurable modules and report generation without replacing system components
· Be capable of harvesting structured and unstructured information
· Maintain optimized performance without the need for complete data refreshes as
new data sources are added
Matching and Standardization functionality is required in order to:
· Maintain all versions of client records with pointers to source data
· Retain all records separately and support multiple views
· Conjoins or disjoins identities automatically as new information enters the system
· Maintains an immutable audit trail on individual data elements
· Is sequence neutral to provide consistent response to queries
· Supports parallelism of multiple I/O throughput channels
· Allows for multiple matching rule sets which include both probabilistic and deterministic algorithms
· Contains sophisticated name matching algorithms that can
o match names both within and across multiple cultures
o match names with more than three parts or tokens
o match names when out of order
o recognizes prefixes, suffixes and infixes,
o handle partial names and initials
o match organizational names as well
· Normalization routines to standardize
o names
o addresses
o numbers
o dates
o domain testing for standard codification
o detect and invalid and generic values
The Reporting and Analytical tools functionality will:
· Utilize Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language with rich interactivity while eliminating client system downloads
· Easily embed into a J2EE development environment
· Display graphical interface to specify complex business logic without coding, within the design module
· Provide capability for individual users to configure personalized analytic views and charting options
· Utilize Dynamic OLAP reporting through charts and balanced scorecard configurations
· Be capable of creating an OLAP metadata layer that defines engagement categories, dimensions and time hierarchies, etc., once; for repeatable, consistent, ongoing report creation.
· The ability for users to perform multidimensional analysis by drag and drop or point and click manipulating the data displayed in the grid and chart; including drilling,
pivoting and sorting. Drive analysis of data from multiple data sources, both relational and multidimensional. Capabilities must include:
o Ranking
o Derived calculations
o Ordering
o Filtering
o Percentiles
o Variances
o Standard deviations
o Correlations
o Trending
o Statistical functions, and
o Other sophisticated calculations while performing analysis
· Provide ability for users to add comments down to the individual cell level for collaborative analysis on every detail
· Bookmark a data view and later retrieve the same view with up-to-date data
· Make it possible for users to organize their bookmarks into folders
· Leverage the existing SSA e-mail infrastructure for users to save and e-mail views of information and collaborate on analysis and decision making.
C. COUNTY RESPONSIBILITES
The County will:
- Provide the appropriate workspace for the vendor’s implementers on an as needed basis.
- Select a SSA personnel for purposes of knowledge transfer.
D. CONTRACT TERMS AND AMOUNT
1. Contract will be effective for the duration of building the data warehouse, training and knowledge transfer.
2. The maximum contract amount is to be determined.
3. The contract will include clauses covering mandatory contract terms and conditions, order of precedence, compliance with laws, liability, period of performance, force majeure[1], availability of funds, notices, disputes, failure of performance, damages and termination.
4. Audit & Record Retention - The contract will contain a clause that grants the federal government, the State, or their duly authorized representatives access to any books, documents, papers, and records of the contractor which are directly pertinent to that specific contract for the purpose of making audit, examination, excerpts and transcriptions.
The contractor is to retain all required records for three years after final payment or until any pending matter is closed, whichever is later.
E. VENDOR QUALIFICATION CRITERIA
Under this RFI, the SSA requires an eligible and established vendor meet the following requirements:
1. Must have demonstrated ability to build the type of data warehouse as stated within this RFI and meet all specifications as detailed in the “Specific Characteristics and System Requirements” section.
2. The ability to provide training at SSA or designated site.
3. Possession of all permits, licenses and professional credentials.
F. SPECIFIC RATING CRITERIA:
Proposals resulting from this RFI or subsequent RFP process will be reviewed and rated as follows:
Rating Element
/ Possible Points / Points EarnedGeneral System Characteristics / 25
Specific Characteristics and System Requirements for the following:
§ Data Warehouse / 25
§ Matching and Standardization Functionality / 25
§ The Reporting and Analytical Tools Functionality / 25
G. COUNTY CONTACTS
Questions regarding this RFI must be submitted in writing to:
Attn: Don R. Edwards
Alameda County SSA Agency
2000 San Pablo Ave. 4th floor, Oakland, CA 94612
Phone: 510-645 -9350
Fax: 510-271-9189
Email to:
H. STATE & FEDERAL PROCUREMENT GUIDELINES
Grantees and sub-grantees will conduct procurements in a manner that prohibits the use of statutorily or administratively imposed in-State or local geographical preferences in the evaluation of bids or proposals, except in those cases where applicable Federal statutes expressly mandate or encourage geographic preference. Nothing in this section preempts State licensing laws. The link for the full text can be found at: