2016 Q4 ISSUE COSTTREE CAPTURE. 13
WALL OF WIRES
Your financial accounting software probably allows users across the agency to input, view, and manipulate data on demand. You gain accountability for transactions, transparency in an audit, increased accuracy, and so many more robust possibilities.
But what does it take to keep this software alive? It takes network technicians, database analysts, vendor support personnel, user training, and don’t forget the tremendous cost of the hardware. Modern software technologies continue to accomplish what the word processor did—increasing the quality and quantity of output but NOT reducing the workload.
In fact, they do the opposite. Instead of spending our time in the manual input of everything, we spend hours staring at the screen trying to figure out how to do one thing, we get paralyzed when something doesn’t work right, and we hit a wall and all work stops. Thirty years ago, the I.T. department of a city was probably two people in a mainframe room, and they were mostly forgotten by the rest of the city.
Today, any given I.T. department is probably the largest support center in the agency and unquestionably the most business critical. I.T. departments are so large, they are no longer departments; more and more are becoming internal service funds, as their financial requirements for future I.T. capital investments are so large. No longer lost in a dark room, the I.T. department keeps your financial software up and running as well as all the other systems that use that financial data.
What happens when you need that financial data from your ERP to submit a grant reimbursement request, to create user billings, or to create your cost allocation plan? You have three separate pieces of software for each of these tasks that do not talk to each other. Do you know how to access it? You need to pull down that financial data and re-enter it … three times. That data is behind a wall and only useful to a certain user-group for a certain purpose. You need to export, manipulate, and re-enter the data over and over and over. YOUR DATA IS TRAPPED INSIDE A WALL OF WIRES!
"Your
data is trapped inside a wall of wires!"