Failing in the public sector

1. October 2010 by admin.

Two recent news events highlight the triumph of hope over … reality?  Historically ERP implementations have been a failure for the public sector as government really is different.  In the City of Gold Coast, in Australia, the local government has decided to go ahead with implementing SAP as its whole-of-government system.  This includes a property tax billing module that has never been shown to succeed in Australia or New Zealand.  Those in the know cite Wollongong and Christchurch as two examples where an SAP implementation has been less than successful

In June it was announced that the city of Indianapolis and Marion County have embarked on a $16 million technology overhaul designed to improve business processes, standardize technology and drive down costs.  Under the planned three-year effort, the city will replace its ancient mainframe-based back-office systems with technology based on Oracle’s PeopleSoft ERP suite.  (That’ll be the one Larry Ellison tried to kill off shortly after he acquired the company via a takeover).

Computerworld comments that “Several similar efforts by other state and local governments have failed in dramatic fashion over the past few years”, but Indianapolis IT officials are hopeful they can pull it off successfully by keeping the project focused tightly on business process improvements rather than technological ones.  "We are going to focus on business transformation and not the implementation of technology," said Glen Baker, the city’s CIO. "We are committed to implementing the products as vanilla as we can" to minimize technical complexity, he said. "We have as much opportunity as we need to modify them later"

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