SAP: Raising The Bar: How Technology Is Changing Value Delivery For Government #techUKDigitalPS

The pandemic, restrictions from legacy technology and economic efficiencies have all been key drivers for government organizations to shift from ‘not quite cloud ready’ to embracing the cloud to improve core services, digitally transform their departments and of course, accelerate time to value.  

But simply buying and implementing a Could ERP system won’t necessarily deliver value on its own. The real opportunity for creating value is in using this powerful, sophisticated technology to transform your business processes for better outcomes for government employees, citizens, and society. Because technology companies are continuously working on R&D behind the scenes and delivering functional improvements via the cloud, organisations are always getting regular updates with ERP innovation. It’s a steady drip feed of ongoing value with no shelf life. It also ensures the public sector avoids falling into technical debt from missed upgrades, often due to lack of resources. 

Until recently, that was pretty much considered the extent of ERP value. Government organisations purchase the software, the technology vendor or partner helps you get set up and running, and you receive some great innovative improvements two or three times a year via the cloud. How you choose to harness all that untapped potential and create value from it was largely down to you and your IT department. 

However, more recently, forward-thinking ERP vendors have taken on much more proactive ownership of value delivery, offering personalised guidance and recommendations from their experts and using data-driven insights to ensure all the available value is being maximised. 

This goes beyond just best-practice, tips and common pitfalls (although that’s obviously critical to ensuring a fast track to value). Using a modular approach and matching a department’s specific and unique objectives with clear, tailored plans, regular check-ins and explaining what all the latest innovations can do for them, government organisations can now apply all this functionality within the context of their own specific plans and objectives. It has raised the bar on time to value. 

During the pandemic, for example, the finance ministry for City of Hamburg was entrusted with creating a cultural aid-application platform for artists who were negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions throughout Germany. Using SAP Business Technology Platform and guided by the personalised advice and guidance from experts from SAP Preferred Success, they were able to go from project start to live in just three weeks, evaluating and classifying more than 2.7 million documents and processing 47,000 cultural aid applications.  

With a limited workforce on the part of the authorities, the AI-based decision support, combined with the guidance and insight from SAP experts meant more than one million cultural events were successfully registered to the aid platform. On the social side, the distribution of financial aid in real time helped the cultural industry survive COVID-19 restrictions, enabled events to take place with reduced capacities and provided confidence in event planning. And overall, it ensured that a diverse cultural life in German cities and communities could quickly start again. The project’s success is serving as a best-practice model for helping people in need in other sectors or situations in the future in a fast and reliable way. 

The combination of the cloud with modern ERP systems is redefining how government creates lasting value for public sector staff, employees, citizens, as well as the wider society it serves. 

This article was written by Carl Jones, Pursuit Lead for Central Government at SAP. Carl Jones has been working with public sector organisations for over 30 years. Selling new technology and end to end mission critical solutions, to enhance the operation of the business and underpin transformation programmes. He has been working at SAP for the last three years as Pursuit Lead focusing on the central govt depts within the Matrix and Synergy Clusters. Carl understands the importance of delivering value and clearly defined outcomes. By leveraging the functionality delivered by modern cloud based technologies, with the unrivalled integration capabilities, organisations can access the silo’s of information in disparate systems across a complex landscape. Allowing departments to deliver public services fit for the future. Learn more about this author here.

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