Develop a process to initiate/manage hardware procurement

As we enter construction the SKAO is now responsible for all the hardware (and potentially services) procurement needed to ensure that teams can do their jobs effectively. Hence we need a process to initiate and manage procurement of hardware to be used by the software teams for deployment and test purposes.

This might range from very small (€1000, say, for test equipment or a small amount of cloud usage), small (~50k, say, for a fully equipped server or two to evaluate accelerators), mid-range (€500k, say, for early array release systems) to the eventual €50M systems that are required for the final systems.

I would start by focussing on the very small and small systems. We may need a number of these every year and teams must not feel there is a huge bureaucratic overhead to doing this or else they will not buy systems when they need them. However, there also need to be controls to avoid unnecessary duplication and adherence to common standards. Hence, we need a lean and proportionate processes that abides by the SKA procurement manual, but gives the teams an appropriate stake in the process.