Integrating the Ivory Tower – State and City Government and Education Leaders make forays into consolidating information systems.

Talking IT consolidation these days is preaching to the choir. Once-unwilling state bureaucracies see the wisdom of merging IT operations. Now they are steering toward enterprise consolidation and beginning to reap the rewards.

Yet one area ripe for consolidation seems to have escaped notice — government and education. Given the whopping percentage of a typical state’s budget earmarked for education, why wouldn’t consolidating state government and education IT get more attention?

Government/education IT consolidation is the exception to the rule — only a handful of state and local governments can boast of IT mergers of this sort. Among states, North Dakota embarked on a government/education consolidation plan in 2002, while at the local government level, Sarasota County, Fla., took the unusual step of designating one CIO to oversee IT operations for both the county government and the Sarasota County School District.

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The Boston Experience
In 1998, Boston Public Schools and city agencies started work on a joint implementation of a PeopleSoft ERP software package, said Sally Glora, city auditor and project manager since the implementation’s beginning. By July of the following year, the city had rolled out the financial module of the ERP, Glora said, then added the HRMS and payroll modules approximately eight months later.

"We just recently, this past fall, upgraded the financial system, and we’re now looking at upgrading the HRMS again," Glora said. "We made significant progress in changing our business processes during that time by standardizing our business practices across the city and schools."

Data reconciliation issues served as the initial impetus for consolidating the two branches of government on one software platform, said John McDonough, CFO of Boston Public Schools.

High-level school administrators expressed concern that too much time was spent trying to determine whether the city’s data was accurate or whether Boston Public Schools had the better data on projections of future expenditures overall or costs associated with specific school programs, McDonough explained.

"One of the initial goals of this project was to end up with a single source of data that everybody shared, that was consistent across all departments of the city and put the School Committee in a position of focusing their attention more appropriately on the substance of policy rather than the conflicting supporting documentation that contributed to some of those discussions [on data accuracy]," McDonough said.

Besides freeing up administrators and principals from minding that sort of minutiae, the joint ERP implementation also allowed Boston Public Schools to centralize payroll functions so individual schools no longer had to deal with that particular headache.

"If you think about the newer levels of accountability for principals and headmasters in schools and their role as instructional leaders and how we, as central support services, support them in that role, it’s really looking at how they’re able to manage their time and what they spend their time on," McDonough said. "To the extent that they’re tied up with administrative or operational requirements, it takes away from their primary role as instructional leader of the school."
The potential savings should be enough to make such consolidation attractive to many states, especially since cutting costs and driving efficiency in government is the mantra coming from state capitols over the past several years.

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By Shane Peterson

Full Story: http://www.govtech.net/magazine/story.php?id=94101