Government technology and Government Resource Planning news summarized by the FreeBalance Strategy & Innovation Group.
CYBERSECURITY KEEPING GOVTECH LEADERS UP AT NIGHT? “Cybersecurity was the highest priority listed by the 313 survey respondents, mostly made up of federal CIOs, chief technology officers, chief information security officers and other high-level IT executives.” reported Derek B. Johnson in FCW. The survey by the Professional Services Council and Grant Thornton found GovTech leaders found “human error, malware and phishing attacks all rate high on the worry list — all threats that are less about technology and more about mistakes or poor cyber hygiene on the part of end users.”
CLOUD IS NOT ALWAYS EASY: The transition to cloud ERP in the public sector can be challenging as Natalie Bruzda reported in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The $41M Workday implementation, $14.5M of which is SaaS subscription, at the Nevada System of Higher Education has been delayed a year. This experience matches the “cloud hangover” experienced by many customers reported by David Linthicum in InfoWorld. Linthicum analyzed results of a survey by technology analysts, 451 Research, “now that enterprises have done serious work in the cloud, they’re a bit unhappy with their cloud technology providers. It turns out that migrations are not so easy, and service levels aren’t what they expect.”
GOVERNMENT DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION PROMISE: Governments are testing cryptocurrencies reported Mike Orcutt in the MIT Technology Review. “Government bankers across the world believe this has the potential to replace cash and make other payment systems more efficient.” Blockchain is one of the technologies that technology analysts, IDC, calls “3rd Platform” that will represent nearly 3/4 of all IT spending by 2020, according to a synopsis by The Millennium Alliance. Although the migration to cloud may not be easy, IDC predicted that “cloud-first will become a reality taking 67% of enterprise IT infrastructure spending.”
ERP IN GOVERNMENT IS NOT EASY: The Government of Canada PeopleSoft payroll implementation, known ironically as the “Phoenix Pay System” has been in the news for a few years. Last week, Emily Haws of the Hill Times reported on the increased backlog of unresolved cases from 237,000 to 257,000 in the pay system. Meagan Gillmore in Rabble described public servants frustration with federal government unions. Employees “who have not been paid properly since the government started using the Phoenix pay system in February 2016 aren’t just mad at their employer. Some are also frustrated at the unions that represent them. They think the unions should be more aggressive in pressuring the government to fix the growing problems and provide more clarity to their members about what’s happening. They say information from unions has been slow and vague, at times. Some want the unions to pursue legal action; others suggest strikes.” Will the manufacturer of the PeopleSoft system, Oracle Corporation, come to the rescue? Kathryn May in iPolitics revealed a $2M federal government sole-source contract with Oracle Consulting.
