Government Agencies Seek Modernization In The Cloud

By David F. Carr

Oracle’s government customers are turning to cloud services as a faster, simpler way of modernizing systems.

That was the common theme during an Oracle OpenWorld panel discussion last week that included Kevin McHugh, state payroll director for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Paul Pauesick, director of IT for the Kansas City Board of Public Utilities, and Deborah Cherney, deputy general manager Eastern Municipal Water District, a utility in Southern California.

In each case, their moves were not necessarily part of sweeping initiatives to move systems into the cloud, but they found Oracle’s cloud applications the best answer for their requirements.

McHugh specifically spoke of the Comptroller Office’s “baby steps” into the cloud. Using Oracle Taleo Recruiting Cloud Service made perfect sense because the state hiring process was particularly dysfunctional. “It took us 137 days to hire someone,” he said. “When you have a new governor coming in, that’s unacceptable.”

The state also recognized that antiquated job application processes were hurting its ability to recruit, he said. Consider new college graduates, he said: “If they can’t do it on their iPhone, they’re not going to do it at all.”

What’s also true is that recruiting was deemed less sensitive than many other functions of state government, such as revenue or healthcare data. “How much harm can you do with a recruiting system?” he joked. “They’re not employees yet.” McHugh said he has been paying close attention to Oracle’s pronouncements about the security of its cloud offerings and will be watching those developments with great interest before deciding to go further.

Modern HCM Systems

At the Eastern Municipal Water District, Oracle HCM Cloud will replace a hodgepodge of payroll, benefits, and other human resources systems, some of them homegrown or decades old, Cherney said. The project started not with any desire to move to the cloud but with “the harsh reality that we needed to do something” to modernize systems and make them more coherent.

Even then, many of the utility’s leaders initially perceived the cloud solution as “way too out there” compared with a traditional software upgrade. Oracle’s eagerness to sell the solution was also “pretty overwhelming,” she said. “Oracle salespeople are pretty slick, and we’re just, like, a country water agency.” Only after concluding many of the alternatives fell short, and then visiting with an Oracle cloud reference customer, was the utility persuaded to move forward.

The water utility is still in the midst of the first phase of the HCM implementation, and some of the users who had been skeptical of the change are just starting to see the benefits. As employees get glimpses of the software through initial testing, they are seeing how many redundant data entry tasks and spreadsheet-powered workarounds they will be able to eliminate, she said. For example, people not only had to make decisions about data quality but then copy it from one system to the other in the process.

“Not everyone is embracing that at the same pace,” Cherney said. Employees whose job involved copying data from one system to another sometimes feel threatened, she said, while others “see that it is going to allow them to be more effective and drive more value.”

Ultimately, she hopes the result will be that process “will not be as siloed, because people are going to learn to trust each other more.” Part of that will be learning to trust that once data has been entered into the system, it doesn’t need to be entered again by someone else, she said.

Financial System for the Next Century

The Kansas City Board of Public Utilities has been modernizing in other ways, for example by deploying smart meters and new software for utilities management, and decided its ERP system needed to keep pace, Pauesick said. “We needed a financial system to take us into the next century.” The board had been running PeopleSoft Financials on premises but concluded it was “a good tool for the '80s and '90s but doesn’t speak to the issues we have going forward,” he said.

Pauesick’s answer was to move to the next generation of Oracle’s ERP technology, and do that in the cloud. He was able to implement 21 modules in seven months, making his cloud ERP implementation “one of the largest to date,” he said. The utilities board also implemented Oracle Hyperion Public Sector Planning and Budgeting for financial analytics, on premises, and configured it to pull data from the cloud.

Pauesick said another part of his motivation for being an early adopter of the Oracle ERP Cloud was the opportunity to “be in the driver’s seat, ahead of the curve,” pushing to make Oracle deliver on the requirements of public-sector organizations.

Both Pauesick and Cherney said some of the resistance to moving to the cloud came from within their IT organizations, where employees who were used to managing server boxes saw the cloud as a threat. But as an IT leader, Pauesick said he was also able to be more effective by spending more time on change management—guiding the organization through the practical process changes that invariably accompany new technology.

“I was more effective at those things because I had more time to do them—I wasn’t hardware sizing or messing with servers and racks, fire suppression, and general infrastructure. I can concentrate on the application itself because those things are all gone,” he said.

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David F. Carr is a technology writer and editor.