“When it comes to the big modernization projects that we’ve been talking about, success is based upon adoption and usability of the people, of the workforce, of the end users, in service to the public,” Christine Maii Sakuda, Hawaii state CIO and administrator of the Office of Enterprise Technology Services, said.
The state is in the middle of a request for proposals process to modernize its financial management systems technology, which has not seen a major update in nearly 50 years. The RFP solicitation period ends June 12 for the $68 million endeavor, known as the Enterprise Financial System Project. Sakuda discussed aspects of the project Tuesday during a FedInsider webinar.
The financial management system, as it now stands, is an outdated legacy system still operating largely due to “a whole bunch of workarounds,” the state CIO said.
“There are shadow processes built on top of one another. Patchwork integrations that happened across the system,” Sakuda said, describing just how arduous the current system has become. “Very few people know how the system works in totality. Because everyone’s got a workaround of some kind, to make it work today.”
Once a vendor is selected, the implementation process for the new system will take about three years, according to an April 10 column by Keith Regan, Hawaii state comptroller, for the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
A significant piece of creating and implementing a new system — which Sakuda described as a “beautiful, modern financial management system that’s going to fundamentally change the way business processes work” — will be the human, or workforce, side of the project. In the jargon of state government, it’s what officials call “change management.”
“The success of the modernization project is dependent upon the buy-in of the users, not only within the central financial agency — the Department of Accounting and General Services — but also the departments,” Sakuda said. “Nothing happens without the workforce buying into using this system, and also taking some agency ownership of it, and contributing to how the system can not only be better for them, but also for the state.”
To help this effort, the state has identified “change management advocates” across the various departments to provide input on how they are using the system today, and — perhaps more importantly— how the system should work for them in the future. That feedback has become part of the RFP, the CIO said.
State leadership has been transparent with the workforce, telling them the change will be initially disruptive, she added.
“And we’re here, on the journey with them to help them, help the state deliver better services,” Sakuda said. “Personally, I’d like to see more investment in change management. It’s the people that are the biggest assets of government. And so, we need to invest in them, and help them help us implement modern systems.”
It’s not just Hawaii’s financial management system that’s been slated for modernization. The state is also eying a reimagined unemployment insurance system. That effort was getting underway about five years ago, but the COVID-19 pandemic halted the project. (House Bill 477, aimed at smoothing encounters between claimants and employers and laying groundwork to improve the system, cleared the state Legislature and headed to the governor’s desk for a signature April 21.)
Modernization projects are often selected based on the age of the system in question, Sakuda said, indicating some of the state’s major modernization projects going on right now are replacing legacy systems that are decades old.
States are not always great at “investing in our own internal infrastructure until we really, really have to,” she said.
Modernization of legacy systems often includes the consolidation of systems, migration of some applications and data to the cloud, and other improvements, Abe Rosloff, senior sales engineer at Datadog, said during the event. The company, whose platform offers visibility into infrastructure performance, has a focus on the public sector.
Tech and department leaders, he said, should identify what the goals are, up front, “in a very concrete way.”
“Not just this general idea that ‘we should be in the cloud,’ that ‘we should be using machine learning,’ but actually, what improvements are we specifically hoping to see,” Rosloff said. “Is it possible to make some kind of metric to indicate that success?”
