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quickly add new customers, and staff routinely printed seven copies of an invoice for approvals. In just 16 weeks, Nazer and his team were able to move to Oracle ERP Cloud. “Entering data has become so easy now,” he said. “And now, managers can approve requisitions on their phone.”
HR systems are another area
that drastically need an overhaul. Government is facing a crisis concerning talent recruitment
and retention as the baby boom generation retires from public service. And some government agencies have received bad publicity about the lengthy recruiting cycle, with younger talent favoring private industry over public. Flexible, integrated systems such as Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud can help agencies more effectively recruit
and process job candidates, as the City of Chicago (sidebar) learned. These systems offer features that this emerging workforce is accustomed
to, such as applying for a job on a mobile device.
Although many established systems like PeopleSoft work
Service Cloud Amplifies
Citizen Voices
The City of Fort Wayne, Indiana, has connected 23 essential agencies directly to its citizens by launching a 311 Citizen Call Center using Oracle Service Cloud. This “front door” to city services allows residents, business owners and visitors easy access to submit service requests and get information via an integrated mobile enabled web and telephone system. Citizens can use their mobile devices to report a pothole, a malfunctioning streetlight or an abandoned vehicle. Since its inception ten years ago, the 311 Citizen Call Center has handled 1.5 million calls. Today, the City of Fort Wayne uses Oracle Service Cloud Analytics and Reporting to provide a graphical “Citywide Scorecard“ to department heads, supervisors, elected officials and community leaders. This information helps Fort Wayne continuously improve departmental performance and citizen satisfaction.
Standards and Certifications
Alignment with standards and guidelines related to data security in the cloud is critical for government agencies. Depending on your needs, you should ask your prospective cloud vendor about these certifications: FedRAMP, HIPAA, HMG Cloud Security Principles Framework, PSN Compliance, NIST 800-54, CJIS, and commercial standards including SSAE SOC 1 and
SOC 2, ISO 27001 and PCI.
extraordinarily well on-premises or even simply “lifted and shifted” to the cloud, often cloud native systems have some built-in advantages. For instance, Oracle is now embedding artificial intelligence into many of
its solutions, incorporating machine
learning algorithms. “In the past,
HR software would simply parse through the resumes looking for keywords” said Amalfi. “Now, using machine learning models, candidates are classified through a contextual examination of the entire resume.”
Speed and innovation are among the most important reasons to consider cloud options for back- office functions. Unlike on-premises
solutions, which are customizable and generally upgraded every two to five years, cloud-based solutions are updated about twice a year.
“As soon as you customize your system, innovation tends to come to a screeching halt,” says Simon
Threlfall, Oracle’s senior director for strategic modernization. “With the cloud, as soon as we push out new features and modules, you’re current and poised to innovate.”
Fewer Patches,
More Productivity
Government IT managers have their hands full. Innovation falls to the bottom of a to-do list that includes patching and updating applications and hardware, compliance with evolv- ing policy guidelines and non-stop security demands. A CIO Executive Council report found the majority of IT departments spend so much time on day-to-day tasks they don’t have time to create innovative IT solutions.
By offloading non-core duties
to the cloud—tasks like keeping software and infrastructure patched, secure and up to date—IT personnel can spend their time focused on developing modern services.
Using a cloud-based infrastruc- ture, IT staff can quickly spin up a development environment and test a process or application. If it works, it can be moved into production quick-