A $341 million project to set up a common ERP across the federal government produced little of functional value, but there is “strong demand” for access to its repository of process maps, designs and patterns.
The government scaled back the GovERP project at the end of last year, and asked an expert panel to determine what, if anything developed for it so far, could be reused.
The panel’s assessment is blunt: “GovERP’s functional capabilities cannot be reused by entities as they currently stand.”
Of 30 functional capabilities developed, 18 completed functional testing, but none progressed to system integration or user acceptance testing, due to the program being scaled back.
The panel found that developing the remaining 12 capabilities wouldn’t help, and that the underlying tech stack - comprising SAP and some third-party SaaS products - has become outdated in any event.
The government has decided not to sink any more money into it.
About $48 million sat with Services Australia has been repurposed for “sustainment of [its] current ERP solution”.
The only thing left is to salvage anything of value from the large-scale project.
On that topic, the Department of Health and Aged Care may be a beneficiary, as it expressed interest in examining the “architectural patterns/architectural documents and architectural decisions” developed for GovERP for potential reuse in its own ERP upgrade.
“Reuse [of] some of 167 customisations to workflows, reports, interfaces, conversions, enhancements, or forms (WRICEFs) … may help offset ERP delivery and operating costs,” the panel noted.
There is also said to be “strong demand from government entities for GovERP’s existing business process maps, designs, patterns, and related documentation to be made available for reuse by other entities.”
“Entities such as the Department of Infrastructure, Department of Health and Aged Care, Australian Taxation Office (ATO), Attorney-General’s Department (AGD) and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) have raised interest in accessing GovERP’s different artifacts, designs, architecture, and Infosec Register Assessors Program (IRAP) Assessments,” the panel noted.
However, the panel expressed caution at even this level of reuse, noting that savings opportunities needed to be carefully assessed.
“While there are many opportunities to reuse components, licences, environments, and documentation from GovERP, only large and complex entities with sufficient capability could implement one or more instances of GovERP as proposed, and have it represented as reasonable value for money,” the panel said.
With GovERP effectively dissolved, dozens of departments and agencies will be looking to perform ERP uplifts on their own.
The panel suggested that “grouping future ERP uplifts for entities of similar complexity and scale” could be a cost-effective manner to pursue some of these upgrades, as long as lessons around ownership and accountability stemming from GovERP were heeded.
One of GovERP’s challenges, aside from its scale, was the hand-off of responsibility mid-project from Finance to Services Australia.
In a statement, finance minister Katy Gallagher said GovERP “was an abject, eye-wateringly expensive failure.”
“This independent reuse assessment is an important step that will allow us to salvage what we can from the work that has already been done on GovERP and help government agencies to meet their future needs in a cost-effective way.”
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