Integrated Systems in State Government Against All Odds

Integrated Systems in State Government – A Project Manager’s Perspective

Prepared by Ed Watson

“People cannot discover new lands until they have the courage to lose sight of the shore.”

-- Andre Gide

Opening Statement

Sylvia Vaught peered out of her 5th story office window and watched a tugboat slowly navigate the Mississippi River, pushing its load of barges (7 barges long and 3 barges wide). It never ceased to amaze Sylvia that such a small boat could move such a large load, much less control it. This got Sylvia to thinking about the Integrated Statewide Information Systems (ISIS) project she had been working on for the past several months. She felt like the little tugboat trying to push its huge load. She remembered instances when a load of barges had broken free from their tow and scattered across the river, thrown about their separate ways by the vagaries of the currents. Whenever this happened, river traffic slowed to a crawl. What a mess! This also reminded her of her current situation, trying to pull together disparate information systems into a single, integrated system. As the tone on her desktop computer sounded, Sylvia’s attention turned to her email “Probably a reply from my contact at SAP AG to a query I posted earlier in the morning,” she uttered to herself. As she quickly confirmed this, she considered the difference in speed of old economy processes as illustrated by that slow moving barge traffic and new economy processes as illustrated by the integrated systems project. At the moment Sylvia felt a bit overwhelmed by the challenges and difficulties as the project director of this particular integrated systems implementation in Louisiana; the first state government to go live on SAP R/3.

Introduction

Integrated Systems

The concept of Integrated Systems was not new in the State of Louisiana. Even as early as the mid 1970s, it was evident that integrated financial planning systems were necessary to exercise tighter control over governmental processes. Early attempts at implementing integrated systems were not successful for various reasons. For example, the field of information systems was not very mature and there existed significant limitations on standards and availability of open technologies for interfacing and integrating the programs required to run various parts of the organization. Also, organizations did not have a proven implementation methodology for integrated, enterprise-wide information systems that could effectively guide implementation teams. Animosity between users and technologists was rampant. Users often pursue short-term need fulfillment (at the expense of long-term architectural IT structure and orderly development), while the IT department can become preoccupied with the mastery of technology and an orderly development plan at the risk of a slow response, or no response, to legitimate user needs (Applegate, et al., 1999). A decade of experience at implementing integrated information systems has shown that balancing the roles of these two groups is a difficult task that must be handled in the context of the corporate culture, the strategic role of IT, and the urgency of short-term problem resolution.

The State encountered both successes and failures with early attempts at integrated systems. By the end of the 1980s, the State owned many disparate legacy systems located in various departments, each having little budget for support, maintenance, training, or documentation. Compounding the problem is the State’s budgeting process and legislature’s role in allocating funds.

As Whit Kling, Deputy Undersecretary at the Division of Administration explained:

We decided we should move forward on integrated financial planning systems in 1990. At the time, the steering committee determined that replacing the Human Resource systems should be our first objective, but legislature was not able to allocate the funds required to make this happen. We went back to the board in an attempt to promote a more comprehensive approach and we returned with a proposal for a comprehensive financial package (including, for example, general ledger, account payables and receivables, purchasing, and contracts). This was approved at lower funding levels. We choose a vendor that would give us extremely deep discounts in exchange for being a beta site.

In 1991, the State began the formal process to replace its existing legacy systems. It was clear that a new financial system was needed to allow the State to comply with increasing financial reporting requirements and to take advantage of new technology to meet internal information needs. The existing systems (known as FACS), provided limited functionality, and were based on a design that did not support on-line, real-time processing and flexible data access. In today’s economic environment, such capabilities are virtual necessities.

As a result of their planning process, the State has embarked on the journey to develop and implement the Integrated Statewide Information Systems (ISIS). ISIS represents a comprehensive financial information system that meets the common accounting, management and information needs of all departments and branches of state government, including the central fiscal control agencies. Deputy Undersecretary Kling added, “As was envisioned in the 1970s, ISIS will substantially expand the amount, timeliness and credibility of financial information available to all end-users.”

The State elected to implement ISIS in seven phases, each phase representing a logical grouping of work to be accomplished; note that phase number does not necessarily imply a conversion sequence. As of today, the first three phases have been completed and Phase IV is nearing completion.

Phase I:AGPS (purchasing) and CFMS (contract management) interacting with the State’s existing system (FACS).

Phase II:GFS implementation including Consumable Inventory Management, AGPS and CFMS converted to interact with GFS

Phase III:Budget Development (BDS), Executive Information System (EIS), Decision Support System (DSS), and Financial History.

Phase IV: Human Resources and Payroll

Phase V: Advanced Receivables Management

Phase VI: Debt Management and Investment Management

Phase VII: Moveable Property Inventory

Surviving the first three phases required tremendous change in the organization. Previously, for instance, there was no interface between purchasing, contracts, payroll and the financial system. No integration. With ISIS, people from different parts of the organization were forced to talk to each other and to understand each other’s business. In general, they were not particularly comfortable with that.

Phase IV: Human Resources and Payroll

As the State proceeds with Phase IV, the pursuit of integrated applications is finally becoming a reality. Comprehensive packaged enterprise solutions are now readily available; nevertheless, a significant concern of the Steering Committee is how they will manage a suite of integrated Best-of-Breed solutions. Or to perhaps put it more appropriately, how they will manage a list of integrated application vendors, each having different visions, agendas, and upgrade strategies.

In addressing the problems of how to proceed with Phase IV of the ISIS initiative, the ISIS steering committee conducted a detail study and hired consultants to direct an external review. In a special report titled “SECURE Louisiana’s Future: Select Council on Revenues and Expenditures in Louisiana’s Future,” Final Report dated April 1995, a memo from the contracted strategy consultants dated April 18, 1994 to the Chairman of the Council, contained the following excerpt:

We found major weaknesses in the state’s funding and staffing of human resource programs, personnel and benefit practices, and compensation and classification system. The state’s performance evaluation system lacks critical elements such as job analysis, training, communication, and employee development plans.

We found that Louisiana does not have a comprehensive, integrated human resource management system. Currently, human resource management is fragmented, and some fundamental functions are not being performed. Over 11 entities share responsibility in this fragmented system.

We also found the Louisiana has failed to properly fund human resource management activities. Lack of funding has resulted in understaffing and has restricted state agencies from accomplishing their goals and objectives efficiently and effectively.

In the memorandum to the Human Resources project sponsors (Division of Administration Deputy Undersecretary Whit Kling, Division of Administration Assistant Commissioner Allen Doescher, and Civil Services Deputy Director Anne Soileau) from the HR Evaluation Team (representatives from Department of Corrections; State Employees Group Benefits; Department of Civil Services; Division of Administration/OIS; and Division of Administration/OSUP) the following conclusions were made:

The HR Evaluation Team was a multi-functional and a multi-departmental team charged with evaluating the Human Resource and Payroll software from Peoplesoft and SAP.

The HR Evaluation Team researched both products through demonstrations, documentation review, scripted workshops and site visits. As a result of this research, the HR Evaluation Team wants to emphasize that it will take considerable effort and cooperation to achieve an integrated Human Resource and Payroll System for Louisiana State Government.

Because this will be a statewide client server application, the technology infrastructure is critical to the success of this implementation and support. Louisiana State Government has no statewide technology standards and the agencies operate autonomously.

While, in the opinion of the HR Evaluation Team, both products can meet the functional needs of Louisiana State government, SAP’s technical architecture reduces the requirements of the agencies’ infrastructure to successfully implement support this application.

With the software vendor selected, the state implementation team next moved to select an implementation consulting partner. A call for proposals was put out for open bid and 8 organizations returned proposals. Having learned from their financials and procurement integrated systems implementation in the mid-1990’s, the state placed an emphasis on the need for change management on this project. One particular firm with a local presence, Nichols Holland, was eventually selected as the implementation partner. Nichols Holland in turn partnered with a change management firm, Holland and Davis, and DACG, and a firm specializing in training & documentation. Dan Gutierrez with Nichols Holland assumed the consulting manager position (among other things, Dan was responsible for assigning roles on the State project). Ron Marold with Holland & Davis was assigned to manage the change management portion of the project. Early in the project, Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) acquired Nichols Holland but this did not materially affect the project team, or the implementation process, in a noticeable manner.

The promise of enterprise system (ES) software is compelling – to enable an organization to integrate the data used throughout its entire organization. A central database is the heart of an ES, drawing data from and feeding data into applications supporting the diverse functions of the organization. With a single database, the flow of information throughout the organization should be dramatically improved compared to fragmented, legacy systems (see Exhibit 1). But implementing an ES also allows, even forces, an organization to streamline its management structure. For some organizations, this means imposing more structure than was existent before implementing an enterprise system; while for organizations, the result is to break down existing hierarchical structures, freeing employees to be more flexible [Davenport, 1998].

Issues and Challenges of Information Systems Project Management

Project Strategy

The scope of the ISIS Human Resources project is practically the entire human resources functions for the Louisiana State Government: personnel and position control (serving over 100,000 state employees), and payroll (serving over 50,000 state employees). Included in this are the major functions of the central systems: CS02 (Civil Service Personnel Management System), AM45 (Position Control), UPS (Uniform Payroll System), and agency-specific internal personnel systems. It is intended to ultimately include all employees and positions (classified and unclassified) primarily in the executive branch of government excluding payroll processing for Higher Education.

The State of Louisiana purchased the SAP R/3 System Human Resources suite of modules including Employee Self Service and the SAP R/3 Accounts Payable module for payroll payables. It is the intent of the State to replace existing HR systems. The new systems should [State of Louisiana Integrated Statewide Information Systems, Human Resource System, Request for Proposal, November 1998]:

• Provide the ability to gather, access, and share comprehensive employee information across agencies and departments of government while respecting agency autonomy, maintaining security and confidentiality, and ensuring a high level of data integrity.
• Eliminate, through integration, systems that redundantly store and process employee information.
• Provide the tools to support comparative analyses.
• Ensure adaptable and flexible software to support current and future needs.
• Allow for ‘one-stop’, ‘single-thread’, and paperless transactions.
• Reduce response time to make system changes as a result of Civil Service or policy changes or the introduction of new programs.
• Support an employee self-service model for maintaining personal information.
• Reduce the effort required to produce and comply with federal, state, and local tax reporting.
• Standardize the data recorded about state employees.
• Eliminate and/or reduce manual processes in both Human Resources and Payroll.
• Provide an information system for projections, modeling, and analysis.
• Automate interfaces to financial and other statewide systems.
• Improve processing through use of best business practices, business rules and workflow.

A new Human Resources system in state government will touch numerous independent departments and agencies as indicated in the State of Louisiana Organization Chart in Exhibit 2. Over twenty departments would be impacted; some of these departments are under the direct control of the governor while some are run by statewide elected officials. The ISIS project executive sponsors are the Commissioner of the Division of Administration (Mark Drennan), and Director of the Civil Services (Allen Reynolds). .

The ISIS HR project was split into two major phases. Phase IV - 1 (scheduled to go-live on October 2, 2000) included: HR organizational management and personnel administration.. Phase IV - 2 (scheduled to go-live on March 19, 2001) includes HR time management, payroll payables, compensation management, benefits management, and employee self-service.

The new HR system is intended to transform the current fragmented payroll, personnel and position management systems into a single, integrated system; in essence, to turn several “old processes” into a streamlined “new process” called employee administration, capable of meeting the Human Resource and HR information needs of the future.

When completed, this project will have a number of tangible effects on the day-to-day operations of State agencies. It will:

• Replace three current systems – CS02 (Civil Service personnel system), AM45PC (position control), and UPS (Uniform Payroll System).
• Standardize business processes.
• Generate timely, accurate information.
• Dissolve functional boundaries.
• Integrate the roles of payroll and HR personnel.
• Align accountability and responsibility
• Eliminate or reduce the amount of time spent on such things as multiple entry, pre-approval, auditing, reporting, tracking, manual processes, and reconciliations. This will enable agency employees to focus on value-added activities.
• Enable Employee Self Service, so that all employees may have the opportunity to access and update their own employee data through the web. The project team was given the following charge: “Change is the foundation upon which a successful implementation will be realized. Change will come with having an integrated, process-oriented system that will reduce duplication and fragmentation of effort. Employee administration will step to the forefront as a dynamic resource. Under the sponsorship of the Division of Administration and the Department of Civil Service, in cooperation with all state agencies, this vision will become a reality.”

Project Team

The CSC team and the State team jointly agreed to use the ASAP implementation methodology. This methodology offers a five phase disciplined approach (project preparation, business blueprint, realization, final preparation, and go live & support) to SAP implementation. This methodology, for instance, led to the ISIS project team framework illustrated in Exhibit 3. The functional team consists of roughly 15 State subject matter experts (SMEs) from each agency including the Division of Administration, 14 CSC Systems Integration consultants, 2 Holland-Davis Change Management specialists, and a team of DACG training experts. The technical team consists of 6 State employees and 4 CSC systems consultants.

The ISIS HR project team encountered many of the typical problems associated with large, complex information systems projects. Many of the problems were due to changes: changes in scope, changes in resources, etc. It’s not that changes are necessarily bad. After all, the fundamental raison d’etre for ISIS was about the need for change. But the issue was how to manage the changes.

The team of consultants hired to guide the implementation had developed a real rapport with the ISIS project team, but even this had some negative consequences. According to Dan Gutierrez (CSC partner):

Our procedures at the State were based upon a true partnership. In doing so, we attempted to act as one with the State and, at times, lapsed into a more informal environment. Because of this, we occasionally accepted new requirements, design changes and other enhancements without questioning how it would affect the bigger picture. Also, many of the informal decisions were not documented and could not be referred to at a later date when other decisions were made. This affected the level of effort necessary to complete the project.

Furthermore, the scope of the SAP implementation kept expanding during the implementation process itself (e.g., the 4.6 upgrade mentioned later). Often the implementation teams found that the software touched business processes that they had not considered when determining the effort’s original scope (e.g., the link between Payroll and the Financial System).