34
FMI
*
IGF JOURNAL
VOLUME 24, NO. 1
A Response to the Thoughts
of Senior Federal Government
Officers on Administrative
Systems in 1992
Doug Lloyd
As I looked back at the article on Finan-
cial Management Systems from 1992, I am
struck by a couple of very interesting facts:
we are still discussing the same issues, de-
partmental financial systems are still seen
as core services to the departments, and
lastly; I am getting to be the same age as
the people in the article. (The latter is a bit
scary to me, as I remember Art Silverman
as a very senior and somewhat frightening
person).
We have certainly reduced our prolif-
eration of Financial Systems to a smaller
number – today 5 systems are in use by
departments and agencies. Some statistics
for you
1
:
• The Government of Canada uses SAP,
Oracle Financials, CDFS, Freebalance,
and G/X for our financial systems;
• 81% of our FTEs use SAP;
• 88% of public accounts expenditures go
through SAP systems; and
• the government creates more than
1,000,000 payments per working day.
The government is truly a large and
world-class enterprise, and we have made
tremendous progress since 1992. It is
progress in which just about every single
member of our community in the federal
public service has participated; and which
I suspect the panel in 1992 would have
though almost impossible.
We are no longer discussing the
possibil-
ity
of a single system for all of government;
we are talking about how we will move to
one configuration for all of government.
This is an important distinction, and rep-
resents an international best practice. Our
voyage to where we are today started with
the previous Comptroller General, Rod
Monette.
Rod recognized the importance of the
fundamentals, and encouraged the OCG
to pursue the development of common
processes and financial structures for the
government. How interesting that the
interviewees all discussed these concepts
of convergence and commonality. Rod
worked to create an investment fund which
provided seed monies for these conver-
gence initiatives.
Our present Comptroller General, Jim
Ralston, has extended the concepts of con-
vergence to their logical ends. He has de-
fined a vision for us of convergence onto
a single ERP configuration, using a com-
monly configured system for departments
to use, and a common financial structure
for our information. Jim’s vision is being
executed, and we are the envy of many
other jurisdictions.
Some of those things thought impos-
sible or impracticable in 1992 are not
only being revisited 20 years later, but
are actually being led by Jim and imple-
mented today! Who would have thought
20 years ago about clusters of depart-
ments all working to share services in
the back office, or a single shared service
organisation offering electronic mail and
desktop services to 40 other departments
and organisations?
The demographics of our community
have changed a lot in the last 20 years too
– the junior finance officers of then, are the
FI04s, EXs and CFOs of today.
Our junior officers have grown up in an
interesting world: the average 25 year old
today never knew a world without the in-
ternet, don’t know what a Sony Walkman
is, and they may use the expression “broken
record” but have often never even SEEN a
record. These are the DGs of tomorrow.
They grew up with technology and know
how to use it far better than we.
I have a daughter in grad school, study-
ing public administration – she holds
down a full-time job, studies for her Mas-
ters, has an A average, and electronically
connects to a network of friends and col-
leagues 24x7. Lest you all think I am just
a “proud papa”, she represents her gen-
eration perfectly – and her friends, by and
large, are all just as ambitious and multi-
task oriented.
This generation has the capacity to take
technology to an extreme end, and will
make the fullest use of ERP tools, and of
what the technology has to offer. It is our
responsibility to provide them with the
best tools to perform their jobs. The drive
to efficiencies and contain costs has also
driven us to rely on the best that technol-
ogy has to offer – freeing financial manage-
ment to move to the next level of service to
our leaders.
So where is financial management going
in the next 20 years?
I think we will see a public service us-
ing a single service provider for our back
office. I think we will see highly intel-
ligent and intuitive reporting tools and
data mines tailored to each user’s needs –
maybe using social media blurring work
and home.
I think memory will be so inexpensive;
we will keep electronic records of ab-
solutely everything for decades – Open
1
2010-2011 Public Accounts, 2012-2013 Depart-
mental RPPs, Association of Canadian Financial
Officers and the Administrative Systems Inventory
2011-2012.
Past
vs.
Present
#2: Common Administrative Systems
Courtesy: Canada Post 2012
100
th
Grey Cup
The
Present
