Employee Welfare and Emergency Communications App

⁠⁠⁠The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) is Australia's lead international presence with thousands of staff across Australia and overseas, managing a network of posts across six continents. DFAT provides foreign trade and development policy advice, consular and passport services, collaborates across government to ensure Australia's global, regional, and bilateral interests are coordinated effectively and securing an Australian Government presence overseas, making Australia stronger, safer, and more prosperous.

DFAT is currently exploring the viability of a implementing a crisis management application capability. This RFI is intended to assist DFAT in understanding the market’s ability to provide a suitable solution and at a high level, the potential costs of the application. DFAT may use this RFI to develop a shortlist for the purpose of a Request for Quote or to inform any other procurement activity.

DFAT has a duty of care to ensure that its staff, across the globe, are safe. When an event occurs that requires the staff at a site to be contacted, the solution must have the ability for the staff to respond indicating if they are safe or not.

This will also be used for other parties who are based at a site where business undertaken on behalf of DFAT. Staff should be able to respond on either a mobile phone or on a desktop computer. The app should be agnostic of cellular or Wi-Fi internet connectivity i.e. simply needs to be connected to the internet. The app should allow a senior user at a site to administer the staff at that site and the staff at a site should not be able to communicate with staff in a different site.

The users and their needs

The users are the staff of DFAT and any other users that DFAT has a duty of care over at a site. The users need to be notified when a request for their ‘safe’ status is sent, and able to respond. Users will need to access safety plans in the event of an emergency, hence documents need to be securely uploaded so that the staff at a site can access the safety plans.

Work already done

A preliminary market scan of functionally suitable applications has been performed, based on the high level requirements identified and scoped in this RFI.

Technical/business constraints

All application and user data needs to be hosted in Australia. The app needs to be Software as a Service (SaaS) or vendor delivered and supported Platform as a Service (PaaS). The application needs to be operational during an emergency when traditional departmental networks maybe offline.

Industry briefing

Response format

• References
• Relevant case study

Key dates/ milestones

Completion of RFI process in December