How to Transform into a Digital Government: 5 ERP Indicators

For ERP selection, hierarchical alignment implies alignment of all stakeholders at different hierarchies from top to bottom or vice versa with the project management -goals & timelines. 

Hypothetically, look at this instance of how not achieving hierarchical alignment can disrupt the ERP selection process: The President of a university board wants to implement an attendance tracking system. He believes that manual attendance is a cumbersome task for the professors. He considers this project to be of minimum inputs with rewarding outputs in a shorter duration. 

However, the Vice President wants to implement an entirely new e-learning platform for all the universities in the country. Both the ideas are outstanding and will have positive long term impacts. However opinion differences & vision deviations amongst these two stakeholders would lead to an unfruitful discussion with potential ERP vendors.

An Indian household quote says this in a better way - "How do you eat a chapatti? One bite at a time." While implementing an ERP System, it's not advisable to revamp the entire public sector IT ecosystem in one go. Formulating implementation milestones along the phasing process at a time will minimize the risk exposed to the public sector while ERP implementation. These implementation milestones along the phasing process should be shared with ERP vendors since some ERP Systems are modular and get implemented easily like Roadmap ERP while others are extensive and need massive lift & shift for going live. 

In the public sector, administrative processes may seem like they've been the same forever. Don't let this mentality trick the organization in opting to think about instant public sector needs while selecting a digital alternative. An ERP system is a massive investment - in time & money, therefore making sure to opt for the right alternative with the future in mind will help streamline workflows & ensure better asset management. It is advisable to narrow the scope to the multiple processes running existingly, especially when the systems supporting the process are obsolete. 

It is vital to formulate a list of desirable processes in the new system, along with the supportive maps that shall suffice the ERP Vendors in preparing an ERP System demonstration. The public sector is full of long-time employees possessing the know-how of all the old, up & coming processes.  In these cases, sharing of this tribal knowledge is often up for resistance. This resistance can be reduced by involving long-time employees in the ERP selection process; fostering information sharing. 

With fewer profit margins and no competition, public sector organizations tend to face difficulty in calculating the ROI for new ERP Systems. The public sector has to strive for Return On Citizenship (ROC) - the measure of return on government services & social value addition to the citizens. 

With this intention, always ensure that every ERP System is weighed rationally on these indicators & helps in navigating through the selection process. 

Roadmap ERP is impeccably equipped in transforming today's public sector into tomorrow's digital government.