Tuesday, February 25, 2003

Statewide Systems - Making Sense of the Enterprise I just came across Terry Kirkpatrick's article on IT complexity or How to Stave off Chaos.  The case study focuses on Novell with its 6,000 employees.  The case becomes much worse for state or federal government.  Novell's mission looks fairly monolithic compared to what a state faces in supporting a wide variety of missions and functions that are each supported with a myriad of systems, hardware and software.  Making sense of it at the enterprise level is an enormous task. Novell claims to have saved about half a million every quarter in employee productivity, new-hire setups, help-desk work and other costs through an XML-based systems integration projection.  That's certainly possible, but also represents a tremendous challenge which Don Morrison initially called "a political nightmare."  Government's are certainly aware of that.  Even when we make progress there are costs that are paid and sometimes just the effort to begin such an effort exacts a tremendous toll which is why some are loathe to initiate such an effort.  Utah does have a head start in some areas.  I compiled a list of our enterprise systems the other day: FINET - a centralized financial system, AMS-based Facility Focus - supports management of a significant inventory of the state's building space Fleet Anywhere - management of the state fleet of over 7,500 vehicles Email - although it is not centralized, over 90% of state government uses Novell Groupwise as an enterprise solution for correspondence and scheduling Payroll - supports payroll for all of the state's 20,000+ employees HR - DHRM supports all personnel management through a single consolidated system Incident Management - All agencies will use eTeam for emergency incident response State Fuel Network - Centralized mangement for access to over 500 public and privately operated fuel sites that consolidates the sale of over 18 million gallons of fuel to all state agencies and over 50% of local government and school districts in the state 800 MHz Voice Radio - UCAN supports an interoperable system for state, local, and federal agencies in the state State Wide Area Network - Statewide Geographic Information Database (SGID) - central repository for all GIS data in the state State Risk Management System Statewide Claims System These are only a few, I won't name them all, but it gives us a basis for interoperability that we can grow from.  These systems provide ways to evaluate and aggregate common activities which occur throughout the enterprise.   (Some extend only across state government, others extend into local government and education) Their development and enhancement during the nineties yielded significant productivity gains that have not been thoroughly analyzed.  We need to continue to find ways to leverage what we have to develop efficiencies that can free resources for new, value adding initiatives - to do so requires some understanding of the complexity which is difficult to achieve because of the need for most of the world to focus on their piece of the puzzle rather than the whole thing. 3:00:57 PM    comment []

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