Explanation
BACKGROUND: In the continued effort to provide increased community dialogue and transparency in local City government, Columbus City Council seeks to enter into a contract with GovDelivery for a pilot deployment of a constituent communication system.
GovDelivery’s Digital Communication Management platform operates as Software as a Service (SaaS), a software application delivery model hosted and operated by GovDelivery for use by its clients over the Internet. GovDelivery takes care of the maintenance, support, training and upgrades and is responsible for all hardware, networking, storage, database, security, administration and other costs associated with the delivery of its Digital Communication Management solution.
GovDelivery’s mission is to maximize direct connections to the public through digital communications. The DCM platform improves information access, while lowering costs associated with traditional communication options. GovDelivery typically provides a return on investment (ROI) within the first year through by reducing paper document distribution costs, consolidating list serve software costs and reducing administrative time.
Columbus City Council received presentations and conducted several interviews with representatives of multiple companies which offer similar services as GovDelivery, and met with GovDelivery representatives multiple times over a course of several months. In addition, Council engaged the City’s department of technology (DOT) in evaluating GovDelivery’s proposal, and to determine whether future citywide deployment was viable. While GovDelivery received favorable review from DOT, timing and other priorities make citywide deployment impractical at this time. Instead, experience gained by City Council through this pilot will help inform the decision to expand the program citywide in the future. To this end, Council will waive competitive bidding for this pilot period to take advantage of current pricing and immediately i...
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