FLORIDA
Cash management has been in the bag since July 2021.
Florida’s Planning, Accounting and Ledger Management (PALM) Project, which will total at least $93 million, is set to go live in July 2026, replacing the Sunshine State’s legacy systems for central accounting, department accounting, cash management and payroll.
A mainframe hosts those systems, which were built in part with the COBOL programming language, according to Jimmy Cox, Florida PALM project director.
“The main focus is on replacing our 40-plus-year-old legacy system to ensure the state is able to accurately and timely pay our vendors and employees and can adjust to changing accounting standards,” he told Government Technology via email. “However, some of the additional benefits that will be achieved tie to how agencies and integration partners interact with the accounting and payroll systems, by streamlining business processes, bringing efficiencies across the state.”
He said many paper- and email-based processes will be automated, which will streamline government processes. So will constructing a single, Oracle-based ERP system in place of the “bifurcated” operations of old.
That’s not to say things have been easy — few large projects such as this are. What Cox called “scope creep” has emerged as the largest issue so far.
For instance, when PALM launched, its goal involved deploying a new accounting system using an ERP solution that had as few customizations as possible — in fact, only as required by law.
“Unfortunately, that goal became unrealistic,” he said.
Thanks to what he described as “dependencies for core business systems and processes,” those customizations increased in number, which in turn led to several deadline changes and “multiple implementation approaches prior to landing on the final scope and schedule.”
That was one lesson of ERP upgrades. Another is to respect what came before, even if begrudgingly.
“Don’t discount discovery of the legacy system and the tentacles tied to it,” Cox said.
Officials involved in such projects also must engage all stakeholders and acknowledge their needs, even if those needs won’t make it into the final product.
Not only that, but project leaders must “be creative in how you get information out of legacy system owners and stakeholders. It’s your job to pull information, even when they are not motivated to provide you answers. Everything takes longer to execute for a project of this size.”
RHODE ISLAND
In the smallest U.S. state, a new ERP system is scheduled to go live before the leaves change colors in the fall.
Human resources, finances, hiring, time tracking, payroll, receivables and payables — the upgrades will impact various vital areas of state government operations, as well as integrate with other enterprise systems, at least according to plans.
Nathan Loura, the state’s chief information security officer, described the massive effort this way at a recent National Association of State Chief Information Officers conference:
“ERP is sort of our big rock that we’re moving,” he said. “So we’re about to go live in the summer with that and that was a really unique setup where we operated in almost an impossible timeline. Not only that we brought all the state functions together.”
He said the work has involved not only the state’s executive branch, but judiciary and legislative branches, and the attorney general’s office, underscoring the importance of a big team effort when it comes to government technology in the 21st century.
“It is truly the very definition of a whole-of-state initiative and we’re excited to go live,” he said. “I think most of us are going to be happy to get through production and finally get to sleep for a few days.”
SOUTH DAKOTA
A lot can happen in 37 years.
The National Hockey League expanded to the semitropical South. The Soviet empire fell. A tobacco-addicted society enacted massive smoking bans. But one thing that didn’t happen was South Dakota moving away from its mainframe-based financial system — that is, until now.
The state’s Project BISON — short for Business Information System for Operational Needs — launched in 2024 and is scheduled to go live in 2027. It will “move [the state] into the modern age and change our tech and financial practices,” according to Colin Keeler, director of financial systems and Project BISON project director.
Relying on the old system, which dates to the era of the Reagan administration, a time when analog was still king, has limited the state’s vendor options and resulted in a limited number of tech professionals who can maintain the ERP operation. The new system will help determine how the state conducts its financial operations for decades to come, according to backers.
The new system, being built with Oracle Fusion Cloud, will give the state access to real-time data and an electronic workflow, said Jason Lutz, Project BISON project manager and a former deputy state auditor.
It will replace the paper-based process for billing, “potentially cutting off days and weeks of processing time,” he said. “Reporting tools will become much more advanced.”
When the project is completed, state officials dealing with the ERP will be able to work off the same page, so to speak.
“Everything is separate now — on Excel, homegrown [databases] or Access,” said Lindy Geraets, deputy project manager for BISON. The new system “will really pull all that together.”
This story originally appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of Government Technology. Click here to view the full digital edition online.
