ESBD_File_332252_Addendum 1_TRS000396.pdf

Addendum #1 Solicitation No. TRS000396

Teacher Retirement System of Texas (TRS)

August 30, 2023

ADDENDUM NUMBER 1

TO

SOLICITATION NO. TRS000396

FOR

Data and Analytics Technical Consulting Services

PROPOSAL DUE DATE: September 8, 2023, 3:00 p.m., Central Time

LISTED BELOW ARE THE CHANGES/ADDITIONS TO THIS SOLICITATION.

ISSUED BY:

Max Hernandez, Contract Developer

Date 8/30/2023

NOTE: RESPONDENTS ARE REQUIRED TO ACKNOWLEDGE RECEIPT OF THIS ADDENDUM BY SIGNING AND DATING BELOW AND INCLUDING WITH SUBMITTED RESPONSE. RESPONSE MAY BE CONSIDERED

NON-RESPONSIVE IF THIS COVER PAGE IS NOT SIGNED AND RETURNED.

RESPONDENT SIGNATURE DATE

Addendum #1 Solicitation No. TRS000396

ADDENDUM No 1 **** Important Notice to Vendors ****

SOLICITATION NO.: TRS000396

FOR

Data and Analytics Technical Consulting Services PROPOSAL DUE DATE: September 8, 2023, 3:00 p.m., Central Time

This addendum includes the TRS answers to respondent questions. Other than the clarifications TRS provides in its answers, there are no changes to the solicitation.

Item Questions Answer 1 Can TRS share the HUB presentation from the pre-proposal conference? Slide deck uploaded in the Documents tab 2 Will a recording of the pre-proposal conference be available to the respondents? No, TRS does not record pre-proposal conferences 3 5. Mandatory Requirements: Can you please order experience criteria 5 a-j in the order of importance to TRS? This will help the respondent prioritize and target the response on areas that are of greatest interest to TRS.

a-j are in order of importance

4 Section II: Scope of Work - 1. Background: RFP indicates that the TRS ED&A team has already embarked on developing its overall data strategy. Can you share your preliminary roadmap and examples of the interrelated projects and initiatives you anticipate addressing in year 1?

1) consolidating data for analytics onto Azure based data hub: includes migration of on-premise data to investment focused data warehouse structure.

An integration hub for 3rd-party data. a data portal for investment data. A data science platform for quant engineering teams and predective analytics. improve overall data management of investment data (2) migration of other select data analytics workloads such as health claims, (3) improve overall governance and management of enterprise data and standardize technical stack used by analytics teams.

5 2. Description of Work: What areas of data governance are important to TRS? Since Data governance is typically a multi-year initiative, can you please list out your goals for year 1?

Year 1: data inventory/catalog. Data classification.

6 2. Description of Work: For Master data management, what are the data entities that require mastering at

TRS?

Investment data: Securities (equities, fixed income, derivities). Market Data (prices). Counter Party. Portfolio/holdings. Performance. Customer data : Active Members and Retirees. Partner Data: School districts.

7 3. Project Activities: TRS requires Contractor to perform “Analysis and scoping of projects for the purposes of work order development”. Will this activity, including work plan development, typically be a billable activity or will TRS expect Contractor to complete this at its own cost?

TRS does not expact Contractor to complete analysis and scoping at its own cost. In some cases an analysis and scoping work order might be work order Typically Contractor will work with TRS SMEs (business and tech) to develop project scope, develiverbles, resources, timing and pricing.

8 4. Contractor Key Personnel: For this section, what team structure and personnel resumes are you expecting to see? Would specification of team leadership (both service delivery and technical) be adequate?

for Key Personnel TRS would expect to see: client facing management and executive team responsible for delivery resources. Technical and project client success and engagement lead(s). Key subject experts that may provide direct or indirect technical guidance on TRS projects such as cloud architects, data architects, solutions architects or specific technology domain expertise.

TRS000396 Data and Analytics Technical Consulting Services Q&A

9 5. Procedure for Work Orders: Does TRS expect the majority of work orders to be firm-fixed price? What is your flexibility to structure of fees i.e., T&E?

deliverable based/fixed fee work orders are common. TRS requires manpower fees associated with a fix-fee/deliverable based work order to be clearly aligned with rates provided as part of the master agreeement.

10 Respondent Questionnaire - Respondent’s Data and Analytics: Since the scope section provides an overview of the key objectives of the modern data management platform but no specific work outputs, can we merge the response to this Q with our response for “Engagement Methodologies and Approach”.

yes

11 Sample Work Order: To accurately estimate the effort and provide the right approach, please provide the following additional information for:

Investment Data Hub / Health DW / Financial DW – henceforth “system”

● By system, please share the business areas served and number of business processes that are supported and their criticality factor?

● By system, please provide the number of dependent consumers and dependent applica ons / processes?

● What is the analy cal maturity by system (diagnos c repor ng, opera onal repor ng, basic analy cs, predictive analytics, etc)

● Can you please share what is common, shared and unique across the systems? These could be “subjects”, reference data, etc.

● By system, please list the number of source applica ons, the data load pa erns (full refresh, CDC, real time), the number of production ETL jobs, number of tables and canned reports generated? Also include the team size and team composition for each system?

Please use the follow for Sample Work Order estimates - Investment Data Hub: Investment Management Division. 15 critical business processes. Approx 125 dependent consumers. 5 applications. Operational reporting, basic analytics and predictive analysis. Most data is common. Health DW: TRS Health. 5 critical business processes. Approx 15 dependent consumers. 3 applications.

Operational reporting, basic analytics and predictive analysis. Most data is common. Financial DW: Finance division. 5 critical business processes. Approx 15 dependent consumers. 5 applications. Operational reporting, basic analytics.

Most data is common.

12 This is to check with you the possibility of submitting our proposal for solicitation # TRS000396 – RFQ –

Data and Analytics Technical Consulting Services issued by the Teacher Retirement System of Texas

(CDTFA).

As per the RFQ/Page # 3: Mandatory Requirements/Qualifications, there is this mention - “Respondent must be an experienced consulting firm with 15+ years of experience in developing and delivering on enterprise-wide data and analytics strategies, providing consulting services in the areas of data architecture, data management and data analytics to medium or large public pension or sovereign wealth funds, consulting on data and analytics projects in healthcare, finance, and pension administration business lines, in experience serving State of Texas agency clients.”

We have been providing Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, ETL and Enterprise Performance Management based analytic solutions for the past 12 years (since September 2011). Are we eligible to submit our response for this bid?

no

13 Is there a vendor currently working at TRS that provides these services today? We have a vendor providing a subset of these services until 05/2024

Page 8,9 - Background: With regards to the desire to establish a single source of truth for TRS data, how many different primary data sources exist in TRS that would need to be considered?

roughly 50 primary data sources

Page 8,9 - Background: Is TRS looking to fully migrate its data, workloads and all other capabilities into the cloud, or is TRS thinking of continuing a hybrid between onprem and cloud.

we envision a hybrid environment for the foreseeable future, letting business needs and priorities drive migration objectives

16 Page 8,9 - Background and Page 10 2.f section: As a part of the "data management process across all applications" listed in the key buinsess objectives, and the request for a Data Governance Services listed in the description of work, does TRS currently have a Data Governance Plan being followed, or would that be new to TRS?

TRS has a Data Governance Plan for the Investment Management Division but is early in its adoption. TRS has components of data governance at the enterprise level.

Page 8,9 - Background: What other formats or types of investment information or data does TRS anticipate will need to be "digitized" in order to capitalize on advanced analytics and risk analysis?

data extracted from documents

Page 8,9 - Background: Is TRS's current Azure cloud environments on commercial cloud subscriptions, or GCC gov cloud? What cloud instance types does TRS anticipate needing to utilize in the future?

Commerical Cloud. Not sure we fully understand the 2nd part of this question.

TRS is focused on PaaS and SaaS services. Very little IaaS

19 Page 10 - Project Activities: How many TRS employees would need to be supported in the various data analytics and data science teams? Are they all internal to TRS, or would some be external resources outside TRS?

Health 10. Finance 6. InfoSec 4. Pension 5. IMD 100. data science (IMD 30, Health 5)

20 Please provide the pre-proposal conference attendees list List is attached in the Documents tab 21 1.Referring to MQ point no. 1 (at least 15 years focus assis ng clients develop and delivery on enterprise-wide data and analytics strategies to organizations whose workforce is over 1000 employees) can we partner with another firm who has similar experience and bid as Prime-Sub meeting the MQ using experience from both the organizations in Prime-Sub relation?

Awarded Contractor will be responsible for all services performed under the Contract. When you fill out the HUB Subcontracting Plan form, any subcontractor(s) must be listed therein. Please refer to Section III (HUB Subcontracting Plan Information) of the RFQ for more information.

22 Is TRS Open to a Global Delivery Model, understanding that no data will leave the contiguous US? no