Integrated Systems in State Government

In this post I will be discussing a few of the processes the State of Louisiana went through while implementing SAP R/3.

Change management is necessary in the implementation of an integrated system for various reasons. As Michael Hammer stated that “The hard (technical) stuff is the easy stuff, the soft (people oriented) stuff is the hard stuff.” People do not easily adapt to change, and “Some of them feared the imminent change themselves”. It is vital to have change managemnt experts on any team that is implementing an integrated system for any lagre scale projects. It is necessay for change anagement to force people from different parts of the organisation to meet and discuss and understand each other’s business so that the needs of each department can be reached. Implementing a successful integrated system requires communication among all involved. It is also important for change management to reach a balance between users of the technology and IT department as they have different wants from the new system, users concentrate on the short term satisfactions, while the technologists concentrate on the mastery of the technology.

Integrated systems in a organisation should help with the integration and data flow throughout the organisation. A central database hub where each department can access data and information freely is vital for the improvement of the organisations processes, making them quicker and more efficient. Below is an overview of an Enterprise System.

It was vital for the state to involve their own technical employees in the development and integration of the new system. Firstly the State technical employees know the end users of the system an know there requirements from the system. Once the system is in place it will be up to the technical employees to keep the functioning and to be able to update and new requirements that may be needed by the users. They will need to be able to fix any problems and answer any query that the end user might have so they have to be well versed with the new systems before the outsourced implementation team leave.

The scope of integrated systems can change while implementation is taking place. This can happen for a number of different reasons. One can be due to the end users needs. The end user may not know exactly what requirements they need or might need to change their requirements during implementation. This can lead to delays in the system being developed, it can also raise on costs on the new system. Another change in the scope of a project, as in the State of Louisiana’s system, a newer version of the software can be developed providing better functionality for the users, this can lead to changes to the scope of the project.

When newer versions of software become available to systems, organisations have to look at them closely to see what sort of impact they would have on their organisation. If the new capabilities are wanted and needed by their users they cant ignore this new technology. In the State of Louisiana integrated system they had a choice to make, whether to “go-live” with the integrated system or hold back and for this newly developed version which had capabilities that their users wanted and needed. I feel delaying the ‘go-live” date to wait for these new functionalities and capabilities would have been the best option for the State of Louisiana as the short term delay will lead to long term benefit. It saves on employee confusion and help with employee confidence in the new system, if the older system was to be implemented and then updated quite quickly, employees would question the system and confidence in it might be lost. It saves on training cost and time as the users would only have to have one training day, and one set of training aids. The time would also allow the State technical employees to further their knowledge on the new integrated system to deal with any confusion in the future.