Background

Important Notes:

All necessary information including Complete Terms of Reference, Selection Criteria, and Annexes are found on the following link under Procurement Notice Number IC-93/12:
http://www.iq.undp.org/ProcurementNotices_Overview.aspx 

Proposals should be submitted to the following e-mail address no later than COB 4th of October 2012 (Amman Time +3GMT): SSA.undp.iraq@undp.org

• Applicants should download the application documents (presented in compressed file) from the previously mentioned link for UNDP Iraq – Procurement notice web site, complete and sign them, and send the scanned copies to the email account above by or before the deadline of this post.
• Applications with NO financial offer or MISSING P11 form or the required documents for the technical evaluation will NOT be considered for evaluation.
• Applications WITHOUT Annex 3 for submitting a financial offer instead of other format will not be considered due to the need of Annex 3 for the ease of comparison of the received offers. All the necessary information for this post (TOR, Deliverables, Target dates, etc. are presented in the procurement notice documents) therefore, applicant MUST download it to apply for this post.
• DO NOT send only CV to the Email account mentioned above WITHOUT Annex 1, 2, 3, 4, Cover Letter and Methodology (If Requested) as it will considered as incomplete application.
• The documents are available in PDF (the Procurement Notice, Annex 3, 4 and 5) and Word 2010 (Annex 1 and 2) format; this is the only format available and it will not be provided in other formats.
• Applicants need to use Adobe reader, Word 2010, zipping software (WinRAR) to be able to use and view the documents for this procurement notice.
• Each email should be less than 10 MB; emails over this size will not be received to the above mentioned account.

Background:

UNDP support for the E-Governance is part of its ongoing assistance to the Iraq in the framework of public sector moderinisation support, which aims at providing an integrated approach to e-governance for development within Iraq at the national, regional and local level in line with the Iraqi National Development Strategy, Iraqi Millennium Development Goals and National Development Plan and the United Nations Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF) for Iraq.

The e-Governance Programme is considered a vital component for reforming and moderinising Iraq’s public sector. The GoI has formulated the national e-Governance Strategic Action Plan that aims to harnesses ICT tools to improve basic services to all and to promote all-round good governance, including increased public participation, better social equity and justice as well as a general enhancement of the transparency and effectiveness of public institutions in order to build the necessary platform for a competitive, robust and knowledge-based economy.

Several initiatives were taken place since the launched of the first version of the e-Governance Strategic Action Plan in April 2010.

• The first training of Master Trainers programme held in Amman in July 2010. Following this the national e-Governance training was launched in many training hubs across Iraq, To date, some 3000 relevant government officials have now been trained in specific hubs across the country.
• Following HE’s decision to continue and expand the training to all Government staff at all level as one of the top priority activities of the e-Governance program in Iraq, the second training of master trainers has been led by GoI with UNDP support to train 200 master trainers in a series of five training programs conducted from September till the end of 2011; the trainers will lead the e-Governance training in many training hubs at the central and local governorates targeting 10,000 officials for the account of 2012.

Beside this, many other important initiatives has taken place, such as

• The launch of e-Iraq Portal on July 2011;
• Developing of government inter-operability framework (GIF) and Enterprise Architecture framework;
• Four ICT organisation strategies and a transformation plans for e-Health, e-Education, e-Municipal services, and e-Citizens’ Personal Records were developed, drafted and agreed by each targeted ministry on September 2011.
• The e-Local Government Framework and two pilot e-Local government strategies and transformation plans were developed on 2011.

Though, the re-viewed e-Governance Action Plan set out the vision of a transformational model of effective and efficient government and service delivery for the Iraqi public sector. The e-Governance Action Plan concentrates on ten critical components for the transformational impact of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) tools. For each of the ten core themes, key priority tasks were identified on a multi-stakeholder consultation basis. The ten critical components of the strategic action plan covering: Awareness Raising, Communication and Commitment; Human Capacity and Resources; Government Interoperability and Standards; Organizational and cultural change; Regulatory frameworks; Telecommunications infrastructure; Financial Resource Management, Monitoring, Evaluation and Assessments and Connecting Services and Citizens, and data and Information System.

Building on the results achieved from developing the Iraq Government Inter-operability Framework and the National Enterprise Architecture, and as agreed in the e-governance work plan between UNDP and the Iraqi e-Governance Ministerial Steering Committee, UNDP will support the delivery of Data Policy and standardisation components under the national strategic plan.

In the Iraqi context, there are several aspects related to data or information requirements and they relate to achieve the different phases of the e-Governance transformation process.

In the first phase, internal automation of systems has proven to be a difficult task requiring substantial transformation. Over time, standards have evolved with regard to data collection, coding and processing within Iraq and government sectors. At present, mainly processing of quantitative data already occurs using computer technology. However, data collected may still be used for the purpose of a single entity. Reporting to other entities in the system only occurs on an aggregated basis. This practice led inevitably to duplication and redundancy in the government system.

Data standardization then becomes a huge issue, as it points to the main source of reduction of transaction costs, that is re-use of information across the system. e-Governance provides the opportunity to government agencies to have their individual systems talk to each other. The importance is not on the internal standard of the individual authority, but on an agreed standard across agencies and mandatory posting of agency owned data that can be used by others. This means that they will have to work on a common language to share data. At first, this may simply involve reaching agreement on some key identifiers, like geographic location or personal or institutional identifiers. As the e-Governance system evolves, more and more information could be shared. The idea is to be able to depend on as little repetition as possible in the data capturing and maintenance process and re-use the same data as often as possible among different agencies and other users, guaranteeing security and safety issues.

In this light, standards regarding data collection, coding and processing will have to be reviewed together with the roles and responsibilities of the individual institutions.

Other aspects related to data requirements refer more to the content provision of government information and become highly relevant in the publishing, interaction and transaction phases. This also refers to standards on security, safety and standards on identification or authentication.

These aspects, data standardization, institutional coordination and merging of databases, information provision and the types of interaction and transaction that can take place, tend to be all highly contested by the same public administration.

The e-Governance Ministerial Steering Committee chaired by HE the Minister of Science and Technology were recommended the following interventions in the support of e-Governance as possible action points for Data and information systems:

• Conduct a study on policies and legislation in place and develop appropriate policies and legislation that ensure (data security, confidentiality, access, availability, safety, reliability, accuracy, comprehensiveness, centralization and decentralization)
• Develop appropriate procedures and standards to address the life cycle of data
• Develop data plans of the specialized database schemas (health, Citizens’ Personal Records, Education, Municipal, ...) and their suitability with the databases used for the statistical data
• Develop policies for the data exchange at the level of the various departments
• Unify and coordinate the effort to standardise geographic information system
• Make study through which most appropriate and idealist architectural design is developed to qualify and establish a unified national data center, or a center to link the data in their sites for the institutions, government cloud computing would be a choice as well, etc.

To counter the challenges, UNDP will support in the development of the Data Policy of the GoI. The technical support provided to this e-governance pillar will handle the followings aspects of data policy:

• Data Policy: Develop and test a coherent data policy and regulatory framework
• Structure: Articulate a data life cycle standard (from collecting, processing, analysis and dissemination)
• Data Set Inventory: Illustrate the utility of the data policy using a few high-value data-sets that are to be identified for establishing pilots.

Duties and Responsibilities

Scope and Expected Outputs:
Taking into account the importance of this event, UNDP is seeking to engage a short term specialist in Data Analysis and Visualisation.

The professional senior e-governance specialist is required to work in close consultation with Government of Iraq counterparts and the UNDP governance team and the Senior Data Policy Expert; the specialist will perform the following tasks related to the specific module(s) assigned to him/here:

Developing effective and illustrative data visualisations and data use cases for supporting decision making by various Ministries and Departments of the Government of Iraq:

• Understanding and evaluating the datasets to be produced by various Iraqi government agencies.
• Producing rapid prototypes of data visualisations to illustrate use cases of government datasets.
• Producing draft final print-quality visualisations for workshop reports and publications.

Participating in the policy and scenario building workshops, and providing inputs on optimum manners of collecting, organising, using and publishing government datasets.

To address the data policy and data-set scenario, two workshops will be organized with the different stakeholders in the process across Iraq (expected 30-35 participants for 6 working days each workshop) to transfer the knowledge on the subject. The first one should be targeted the policy-decision of e-governance programme in Iraq, to formulate the required data policy, the second one would target in addition to the senior officials the technicians of the target datasets to build the scenarios of the datasets.

The selected specialist will help in.

• Supporting the workshop processes by developing required draft data visualisations and use case scenarios.
• Documenting the demands of data generation, analysis, management and publication and challenges thereof expressed by various agencies of the Government of Iraq and supporting the processes of conceptualising appropriate approaches and methods.
• Providing inputs as required on data collection, analysis, management and publication possibilities and desirable methods.

Deliverables and outputs:
While UNDP will be responsible for the logistic costs of the participants. The Consultant under the direct supervision of the requesting unit, is requested to produce for the following deliverables:

• Developing effective and illustrative data visualisations and data use cases.
• Participating in the policy and scenario building workshops, and providing inputs on optimum manners of collecting, organising, using and publishing government datasets.
• Development of the final visualisations.

Competencies

Key Performance Indicators during implementation of Services:

• Final print quality visualization.

Competencies:

• Basic understanding of e-governance systems, Management and Geographic Information Systems, national data policies and data-driven decision-support.
• Excellent written communication skills, with analytic capacity.
• Commitment to excellence in producing quality work.
• Demonstrated ability to supervise and manage a team.

Required Skills and Experience

Education:

• University degree (Batchelor) in social sciences, sciences or similar with sufficient quantitative training.

Work Experience:

• Minimum 3 years’ experience in data analysis and visualisation work flows, software and methods, especially using Free/Libre/Open Source Softwares. And Analysing and visualisating national scale socio-economic data sets.
• Basic understanding of e-governance systems, Management and Geographic Information Systems, national data policies and data-driven decision-support.
• Knowledge of database management systems, preferable.

Language Requirements:

• Fluency in English both written and oral (advanced Level).
• Knowledge of Arabic (Beginner to intermediate level) is considered an advantage.

Proposals:
Documents to be included when submitting the Proposal:

Technical Proposal:
(Which will include the following):

• Signed Template Confirmation of Interest and Submission of Financial Proposal. (Please use Annex 1);
• A letter explaining why he/she considers himself/herself the most suitable candidate for the work;
• Personal CV including past experience in similar projects and at least 3 references. Please Use the attached (P11 Form Only) CV Form – Annex 2 attached. UNDP-Iraq reserves the right to disqualify any of CVs who are not compliant with the requested form.
• A brief methodology on how the candidate will approach and conduct the work. The expert is asked in his/her offer submission in the methodologies section to describe the following: The approach that the consultants will utilize developing effective and illustrative data visualisations and data use cases.
• Sample reports of previous work.

Financial proposal:
The financial proposal will specify a total lump sum amount and payment terms around specific and measurable (qualitative and quantitative) deliverables. Payments are based upon output, i.e. upon delivery of the services specified in the TOR. A breakdown of this lump sum amount is to be provided by the IC candidate. Total Fees: Please use Annex 3 – Financial proposal form.
All necessary information including: Complete Terms of Reference, The Selection Criteria, and Annexes are found on the following link under Procurement Notice Number IC-093/12:
http://www.iq.undp.org/ProcurementNotices_Overview.aspx 

Proposals should be submitted to the following e-mail address no later than COB 4ht of October 2012 (Amman Time +3GMT):
SSA.undp.iraq@undp.org