Defence seeks IT support for 2500 staff

The Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) has issued a tender for a help desk contractor to support around 2500 researchers spread over seven sites across Australia.

The DSTO, which is part of the Department of Defence, operates two help desks at Edinburgh in South Australia and Fishermans Bend in Port Melbourne. These are run as a one virtual help desks and field an average of 600 calls each week.

Science Corporate Information Services (SCIS) provides two separate networks (restricted and unrestricted) to DSTO staff who use more than 16,000 applications, 4000 desktops, 1100 laptops, 1500 thin clients and 560 printers.

The agency has asked for an outsourced contractor to provide an end-to-end help desk service, including staff coaching and continuous process improvement activities under a 12-month agreement.

The contractor would need to resolve 50 per cent of help desk calls the first time, which is below industry standards.

However, the agency said it runs a heterogeneous IT architecture in a research environment without an standard operating environment (SOE) and the technical diversity of and complexity of help desk support should not be under estimated.

“The overall DSTO computing environment is diverse and challenge and reflects the needs of one of Australia’s largest research and development organisations,” DSTO said in a statement.

“As the reliance on SCIS within DSTO has increased, the provision of effective IT support has become more important, particularly the quality of help desk support.”

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