Article

Microsoft, GFOA Consulting Survey Identifies Public Sector ERP Best Practices, Disappointments

by Linda Rosencrance
Contributing Writer, MSDW

Microsoft Corp. and Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) Consulting have released the results of "The Real Impact of ERP Systems in the Public Sector," a survey examining current public sector organization attitudes, approaches, lessons learned and best practices for enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation. The results of the survey, which collected feedback from 268 GFOA members, were released recently at GFOA's Annual Conference.

The full report can be downloaded as a PDF, and the results are quite glum in terms of expectations of ERP benefits and costs.  Of those organizations with newer solutions, deployed since 2002 and mostly since 2007, expectations were only met 42 percent of the time.  The areas with the worst outcome in terms of meeting expecations included adoption (33% met expectations), implementation costs (38%), amount of customization required (39%), and ability to meet business needs (40%).

And most expected benefits fell short to some degree compared to expectations.  Only compliance controls exceeded expectations overall, wheres benefits like productivity, cross-deparment coordination, integrated business information, and more informed decision making all fell short.

The aim of the survey was to collect information about the experiences and expectations of public sector organization in regard to the costs of modernizing their ERP systems, the benefits achieved by this modernization and lessons learned from implementing a modern system.

The respondents said certain best practices - many of which Microsoft often stresses in its own ERP offerings -  played a role in the success of their ERP implementations including:

  • Smaller implementations presented fewer challenges than more complex ERP deployments;
  • Planning, due diligence and setup done upfront drastically increased the success of ...

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About Linda Rosencrance

Linda Rosencrance is a freelance writer/editor in the Boston area. Rosencrance has over 25 years experience as an reporter/investigative reporter, writing for many newspapers in the metropolitan Boston area. Rosencrance has been writing about information technology for the past 16 years.

She has covered a variety of IT subjects, including Microsoft Dynamics, mobile security issues such as data loss prevention, network management, secure mobile app development, privacy, cloud computing, BI, big data, analytics, HR, CRM, ERP, and enterprise IT.

Rosencrance is the author of six true crime books for Kensington Publishing Corp.

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