“We spend all our time and effort getting off the mainframe and modernizing,” says Kristen Cox, a Center for Digital Government* (CDG) senior fellow and a former budget and finance executive in Utah and Maryland. “And when I look at the results against the spend, I seldom see a good return on investment. In all our efforts to modernize, we often overlook the key limitations in business operations and diplomacy that are the real constraint. When that happens, we make only marginal gains despite ‘modernizing.’”
With these memories fresh in their minds, public agency leaders may be uneasy about diving into pricey new upgrades.
“As government leaders, we thought these older systems would be one big procurement that solved everything. That was overly optimistic,” says Abhi Nemani, senior vice president of product strategy with Euna Solutions. Nemani is the former chief data officer for Los Angeles and the former chief innovation officer for Sacramento. “In today’s fiscal climate, it’s impossible to justify a big blanket check for one system for everything without being able to prove out the ROI in advance,” he said.
To better understand the challenges agencies face regarding their business systems — and how new technologies and strategies could help deliver better outcomes for constituents — the CDG launched a study of the business application modernization landscape. The research included interviews with state and local agency leaders, roundtable discussions with CDG senior fellows and a survey of more than 150 public-sector decision-makers.
The research showed how agencies today are working to upgrade their business systems in a more agile and modular way. According to the CDG survey, in the next one to two years agencies plan to update business intelligence/data analytics (33 percent), financial management systems (25 percent) and budget management systems (24 percent).
But a range of obstacles stand in their way:
- Solutions built for the private sector may not be a good fit. “When you try to use corporate systems for government operations, it doesn’t work so well,” said a top manager with a state regulatory agency.
- Departmental silos and systems make it hard to integrate data and share business intelligence. Seven of the 15 executives interviewed by CDG said their businesses' systems had little to no integration.
- Piecemeal approaches to business systems add complications, administrative duties and greater cybersecurity risks when moving data. They make it hard to determine a single source of truth for executive data, and they impede efforts to improve constituent service delivery.
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*Note: The Center for Digital Government is part of e.Republic, Government Technology's parent company.
