Agencies taking on enterprise resource management projects often find themselves in over their heads, and they are are beginning to turn to government centers of excellence for help.
Doug Bourgeois, director of the Interior Department’s National Business Center, knows the drill. “Invariably,” he said, “the question that such agencies ask when they approach us is, ‘This is bigger and more complex than we thought it was going to be. Can you take it over for us? Can you manage it? Can you host it for us?’ NBC provides ERP services to “between 20 and 30 agencies,” Bourgeois said, several of which have had troubled ERP projects and asked him for help.
He said that, in several cases, he has had to turn down the appeals. Even though his center runs more than 600 servers, taking over the ERP functions of some agencies could involve adding as many as 200 more.
ERP systems form the back-office sinews of federal agencies.
Properly functioning ERP systems provide agency leaders with accurate, detailed financial data quickly, but faulty systems invite management disarray—and punishment by overseers in the Office of Management and Budget, Congress and other agencies.
Building an ERP system or getting outsourced ERP services is a core task for CIOs and CFOs, but it’s a job fraught with peril. Savvy CXOs study the causes of ERP project successes and failures closely.
Career risks
Congress, the Government Ac- countability Office and the media have highlighted expensive ERP project failures in recent years and federal IT managers are aware of the career risks they entail, not to mention the possible effects on agency programs.
Even with the history of failed ERP projects dotting the federal landscape, agencies continue to take them on. Slowly, however, it seems many are taking heed of the lessons of past failures by not “paving over the cow paths” of such well-known ERP implosions as the Defense Department’s Business System Modernization initiative or Homeland Security Department’s Emerge2.
In fact, several agencies either have decided not to take on these large and complex projects, instead using a center of excellence under the Financial Man- agement Line of Business initiative, or to stay true to the best practices garnered over the years.
Digg
De.licio.us
Slashdot
Technorati
