The primary purpose of this preliminary market engagement exercise (“Exercise”) is for the Education Authority (EA) to explain, and seek supplier views and feedback on, potential approaches for a Configuration Management Database solution. EA requires a CMDB to provide a trusted, accurate and near-real-time view of its ICT assets, applications, services and the relationships between them. Acting as the single source of truth for the DTS estate, it will reduce manual data maintenance through automation, support Cyber Essentials accreditation and provide the foundation for EA’s ICT Service Catalogue. To deliver these outcomes, the CMDB must integrate with EA’s Change Management process and ITSM platform. This integration will ensure that trusted configuration and service data informs change assessment, approval and implementation. By mapping the relationships between services, applications and infrastructure components, the CMDB will allow proposed changes to be assessed against known dependencies and potential business impacts before implementation. This visibility will support more reliable planning, testing and communication, giving decision-makers greater confidence that changes can proceed safely.

Procurement Act 2023

Suppliers who wish to participate in the PME exercise must return the completed questionnaire via the messaging function of the CfT on eTendersNI no later than 15:00 on Wednesday 21 October 2026. Further information including the questionnaire can be downloaded from the CfT Documents area of CfT 6761471 in https://etendersni.gov.uk/.