Attachment_A_-_Vendor_Questionnaire.docx

Attachment A – Vendor Questionnaire

1. Organizational Background

a. What is the complete legal name of your organization?

A.

b. What mobile application development and geospatial (GIS) software products and/or services do you offer?

c. What was your company’s total revenue during the past three years? What was your company’s mobile and geospatial software revenue during the past three years?

d. What is your company’s acquisition history?

e. What is your company’s location?

f. Who is the contact person responsible for answering this RFI (include name, email, and phone number)?

2. Competitive Edge

a. What are two to three capabilities that differentiate you from competitors? Are there any unique value-added services that you can provide?

b. Do you have a policy in relation to offering discounts to clients? If so, what is the policy?

c. Do you engage subcontractors, including system integrators, in the mobile application or geospatial software market? If yes, mention the names of your top five most trusted subcontractors.

d. What is the size of your company’s software development staff and customer support staff for your mobile application and geospatial products and/or services?

3. Vendor Offerings

a. Does your organization offer a Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) product, or have you developed custom software that closely aligns with the business problems, processes, and capabilities described above?

i. If you offer a COTS product, please proceed to answer the COTS Software Questions below (Section 4).

ii. If you have built or would propose a custom solution, please proceed to the Custom Software Questions section (Section 5).

iii. If your solution includes both COTS and custom components, please answer both sections as applicable, noting which responses apply to each.

4. COTS Software Questions:

a. Please provide the name of your software, the primary functionalities provided, and how they align with the capabilities and business needs outlined above.

b. When was the first version of the software released, and how frequently are updates deployed?

c. Approximately how many client companies do you have for this software?

d. What is your approach to integration with enterprise systems (e.g., APIs, middleware, ETL tools)?

e. What platforms are your software available on (e.g., Windows, Linux, cloud-based, mobile)?

f. What system integration services do you provide?

g. What support and maintenance services are available (e.g., helpdesk, patching, SLAs)?

h. Please describe the major changes or enhancements in the last three versions releases.

5. Custom Software Questions:

a. Have you developed a similar custom solution before? If so, when and for whom was it developed?

b. What specific business processes and capabilities were addressed in your custom implementation(s)? Please describe how they relate to capabilities and business needs outlined above.

c. What is your integration approach for connecting your custom solutions to enterprise systems? What tools or methods do you typically use?

d. What platforms can your custom solutions be developed for and deployed on?

e. Do you offer system integration as part of your custom development services? Please describe the scope and approach.

f. What type of ongoing support, maintenance, and enhancement services do you provide for custom-built systems?

g. For your recent custom development projects, what were the most notable changes or improvements made across project phases or versions?

6. AI Capability

a. Would your proposed solution use Artificial Intelligence (AI), and if so, how would AI be utilized?

b. Does your solution feature a natural language or conversational AI interface (e.g., a chatbot or search assistant) that allows an angler to ask complex questions like, 'I am at Lake Shasta, what is the bag limit for Trout today?' and receive an accurate, context-aware answer derived directly from CDFW’s authoritative database? If so, please describe the proposed behavior of this functionality.

c. Does your backend platform utilize AI/Machine Learning to help non-technical CDFW staff ingest, parse, or map complex, legal regulatory text into the geospatial Content Management System (CMS)? If so, please describe the proposed behavior of this functionality.

d. Because this application requires robust offline functionality for remote marine and inland areas, do any of your proposed AI features (such as natural language search) run locally on the mobile device's hardware without an internet connection? If so, what are the minimum device hardware requirements?

e. If AI models are downloaded directly to the user's phone for offline use, what is the estimated file size footprint of these models, and how do they impact mobile battery consumption and processing performance?

f. In a regulatory compliance application, accurate information is critical. How does your solution guarantee that a generative AI component will not 'hallucinate' or provide an inaccurate interpretation of fishing laws? What guardrails, such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), do you employ?

g. Describe how your solution handles data privacy. Can you guarantee that user location telemetry, search queries, or proprietary CDFW data will remain strictly secure and never be used to train public, third-party, or open-source foundation models?

h. How frequently do the AI models require updates or retraining (e.g., when a new fish species variation is introduced or regulations change), and can non-technical staff manage this process via the CMS?

i. If your AI features rely on cloud-hosted large language models (LLMs) or commercial APIs (such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google Vertex AI), how are the recurring variable operational costs—such as token consumption or specialized cloud compute—structured in your pricing model? How do you prevent unpredictable cost spikes from high public usage?

7. Project Management and Quality Management

a. Please mention any project management and tracking systems or tools you use.

b. How do you measure project management excellence of your staff?

c. What is your software development approach (example, waterfall or agile)?

d. Please describe the software development life cycle methodologies you use.

e. Please mention any quality control systems and tools you use.

f. What are key lessons learned from previous implementations?

g. Please share a list of roles and allocation (and a short description of each role) that you believe will need to be provided by your organization to complete this project.

8. Relevant Experience

a. Please provide a list of at least three reference clients.

9. Pricing

a. What are the different pricing models you use with customers?

b. If you are offering a COTS product, please answer question ‘c’. If you are offering to build a custom solution, please answer question ‘d’.

c. For your COTS product, what is the structure of your licensing and maintenance pricing model (e.g., subscription-based, per-user, flat enterprise license, tier-based by data volume or active users)?

d. For custom development, what pricing models do you typically utilize for implementation and ongoing maintenance (e.g., fixed-fee milestone, time and materials, or recurring annual support tiers)?

e. Are your rates and payment methods negotiable?

image1.png