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• brief discussion What is Sustainable Government

Resource Planning?

April 16, 2012

Doug Hadden

VP Products

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• Budget-centric software designed to meet resource management requirements (financial and non financial)

• Sometimes referred to as Integrated Financial Management Information Systems (IFMIS)

• Covers all aspects of government budgeting, revenue, expenditures

GOVERNMENT RESOURCE PLANNING [GRP]

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Version 7 section • Systems must be financially sustainable by

governments

• Environmentally sustainability – Financially sustainability linkage

• Sustainability is particularly important in developing countries

GRP SUSTAINABILITY

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Version 7 section • Show characteristics of

GRP financial sustainability

• Align financial sustainability with Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) concept

• Align financial sustainability with environmental sustainability

PRESENTATION GOAL

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1. Financially Sustainable Prerequisite:

GRP must be operational

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GRP is in use

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delivered on budget

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delivered on time

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achieves expectations

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demonstrably improves processes

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Version 7 section Yet, Failure is not Uncommon • Estimates range (depending on definition) from

20 to 40% for large IT projects

• Enterprise Resource Planning projects tend to have high cost overruns in public and private sector

• Large IT project failure rate thought to be higher in government than in private sector

• Hard for GRP to be financial sustainable long term if failed to meet objectives in first place

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2. Flexibility

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Version 7 section Context: GRP more subject to

change than ERP 1. Cannot adopt many “best practices” because

requires legal reform – that takes time

2. Many argue that there are few “best practices” but many “good practices”

3. It is considered a good practice to sequence public financial management reform

4. Elections result in new governments with different priorities

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ability to roll-out to all government entities without difficulty

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adaptable to change

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supports public financial management modernization

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without need for consultants

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Version 7 section Context

• Government self-sufficiency is a critical theme in GRP sustainability

• Initial success in first phase often difficult to replicate as software rolls out to the periphery of the organization

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Version 7 section 3. Financially Sustainable

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low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

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= low cost to upgrade to next

version

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= low staff and staff retention

costs

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Version 7 section Context

• Staff, upgrade, on-going consultant costs rarely calculated in GRP projects

• i.e. World Bank methodology typically covers 5 Year TCO but not upgrade or staff retention costs

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4. Environmentally

Sustainable

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be substantial

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software may require significant amounts of

hardware

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why is software material to data centre power consumption?

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software bloat: poorly implemented code

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“featurities”: too many unused features taking

memory, CPU, disk

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including requiring many database tables

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computer languages that require more hardware resources (“rust”)

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not to mention: proprietary software languages and

“middleware” requiring expensive consultants and extensive

certification

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you may be shocked to discover how much old & inefficient old client/server software code is still operating in the latest version of “modern” software

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…not mentioning any names…

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so, don’t be fooled by all the “hype”

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• brief discussion putting legacy code in the cloud can improve efficiencies somewhat, but

still does not optimize the power footprint

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Version 7 section Conclusions: Linkages

• Environmentally sustainable GRP reduces running costs

• The “total cost of ownership” for public financial management often much higher than software & maintenance $$$