In a sign Canberra's skills shortage may be far from over, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) will establish a fresh panel of approved service providers to meet its ICT service requirements and augment its in-house staff.

The service providers appointed to the panel, limited to 50 companies, will have an opportunity to put forward "suitably qualified" personnel to perform the services.

The AFP has divided its ICT service requirements into 14 groups covering everything from strategic planning, architecture, and security to software development, project management, and computer infrastructure support.

AFP's information services division consists of some 300 people comprising both personnel and contractors at Weston in the ACT.

Specifically, the AFP requires a range of services within its ICT groups. These are:

Group 1 - strategic planning, policy and advice: principal advisers who can provide advice and services in relation to ICT governance, ICT strategy and planning, ICT best practice frameworks, ICT project management, and enterprise architecture.

Group 2 - architecture services: architects to review, analyze and develop ICT architectures to support business operations. Architects are required to provide design services to the AFP comprising artefact development and support relative to the AFP's enterprise, business, information, application services and infrastructure architectures. The development of SOAs is a requirement here.

Group 3 - analysis and design services: business analysts are needed to work with AFP business areas to determine, analyze, and document requirements and support the successful delivery of AFP business applications.

Group 4 - software development and maintenance services: software developers to design, build and maintain AFP business applications across a variety of environments like SAP, .NET, Hyperion S9, MapInfo, Oracle, SQL Server 2005, SAS v9, and SharePoint 2007.