Key Objectives Of Public Administration When Opting For An ERP System Essay

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ASSIGNMENT 03 – CASE STUDY

2016 Objectives of public administration when opting for an ERP system

In today’s context even the government agencies are evaluated with respect to their productivity and competitiveness, as with the business organizations. This is because, the economy and the social well-being of a country or society depends on the efficient functioning of the government services. Implementing an ERP system in the government agencies enable them to reconstruct and improve the internal processes related to providing government services to the citizens.

According to Ziemba & Obłąk (2013), following are the key objectives of implementing ERP systems for the public services:

• Centralizing the management of the organizational

• Ensure that all government entities comply with a unique structure, process and methodology in offering their services.

• Eliminate the need and practice of unnecessary and duplicate documentation and record management, by centralizing the information systems from different entities of the government.

• Improve decision making and facilitate resource management. ERP systems provide reporting and analytics facilities which can make the decision making process more efficient. It also enables identifying over/under utilization of human resources, which can help scheduling human workforce more effectively.

• Improve the access to information and collaborate information sharing between different entities within the administration. Since an ERP system would be using a single data store across all departments, there will be less time and effort spent on requesting, authorizing and delivering information across different departments. Access control can be imposed by the ERP system itself.

• Increase the involvement of the citizens and other stakeholders in government decision

These factors include clearly defined requirements, creating a formal contract between the government agency and the IT Company, setting up realistic deadlines and clearly defined goals and objectives.

Correct identification of the existing government process, changes required, frozen requirements and understanding the importance of process reengineering are the critical success factors related to the second category.

As the project is a collaboration between both government agency and a private sector IT Company (in most occasions), the project team consists of people from both entities. While the government agency will consist of a team of high-level managers and officers who would define the requirements, the IT Company team is responsible for the overall design, implementation and testing of the system being developed. As far as the IT Company is concerned, they should possess the competency and have prior experience with developing ERP systems. On the other hand, the government agency should have a good understanding of their business process – in and out, and how the new ERP system is going to cater to those functionalities. It is also important that there’s a good collaboration between the two