Sustainable Public Financial Management

Framework for Interfacing Debt Management Systems with Financial Management Information System (FMIS) focus of Commonwealth Secretariat workshop in London, UK

FreeBalance recruits at Africa Jobs Are Calling event, first African job fair in Canada

Ottawa, Canada (22 October 2011) – FreeBalance, a For Profit Social Enterprise (FOPSE) software company that helps governments around the world to leverage robust Government Resource Planning (GRP) technology to accelerate country growth, is pleased to announce attendance at Africa Jobs Are Calling 2011. This job fair will be held in Montreal, Canada at the Hotel Le Gouverneur, 22 October 2011. FreeBalance is a member of the Canadian Council on Africa and supports Public Financial Management (PFM) reforms with GRP implementations in Liberia, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Southern Sudan, and with MCA Namibia. FreeBalance has offices in Sierra Leone and Uganda among others.

“FreeBalance is growing in the exciting GRP market in Africa,” said Carol Tracey, Director Human Resources at FreeBalance. “We have seen the positive impact of modern GRP systems in Liberia, Namibia, Sierra Leone, Southern Sudan, and Uganda. We look forward to meeting people at the Africa Jobs Are Calling job fair to discuss career opportunities with FreeBalance in Africa.”

FreeBalance is uniquely positioned to support PFM reforms in Africa. FreeBalance has successfully assisted governments to implement modern PFM systems in challenging circumstances. The FreeBalance Accountability Suite has been implemented in African and other emerging nation governments where there has been limited connectivity, low bandwidth, lack of electrical power, and low human capacity.

The FreeBalance Accountability Suite is a GRP solution that supports transparency and accountability. FreeBalance solutions for governments and external aid projects and funds simplify administration and reduce transaction costs for government or private organizations managing aid projects. The FreeBalance Accountability Suite automates reporting to donors, project finance management, and project performance management. The FreeBalance solution operates in developing nations around the world, including low-capacity countries, and providing effective donor reporting that meets international standards.

Software solutions from FreeBalance are being used in 19 countries, including Antigua & Barbuda, Afghanistan, Canada, Iraq, Kosovo, Kyrgyz Republic, Liberia, Mongolia, Namibia, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Southern Sudan, Timor-Leste, and Uganda among others. FreeBalance software manages more than a quarter trillion ($US) annual budgets worldwide.  

About FreeBalance
FreeBalance helps governments around the world leverage robust Government Resource Planning (GRP) technology to accelerate country growth. FreeBalance software solutions for public financial and human resource management support reform and modernization to improve governance, transparency and accountability. Good governance is required to improve development results. For more information, visit www.freebalance.com. 

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By James Elrick, FreeBalance

A FreeBalance team spent Tuesday and Wednesday of this week working the booth at GTEC 2011 in the new Ottawa Conference Centre (very nice by the way, great venue). We also attended as many seminars as possible and live tweeted during the presentations. Afterwards, we had several people visit our booth and compliment us on our social media activity (tweets, blog, and more). On our blog, FreeBalance regularly writes about Government Resource Planning (GRP), including public financial management (PFM) and human resource (HR) management, and shared services.

The presentations at GTEC covered a wide range of topics important to government employees. And as FreeBalance only works with governments (we don’t sell to the private sector), the conference topics were also important to us.

The theme of this year’s GTEC event was “Connected Government – Working Together to Better Serve Canadians”. Shared services (download the FreeBalance Shared Services brochure) loomed large over the event, so we took that opportunity to find out people’s thoughts on shared services via an online survey.

Here are several links to give you an idea of what’s happening with government shared services in Canada. 

• Federal government IT remake could take decade, CIO tells conference
• GTEC Day One: An iPad cabinet and where the feds are spending on IT
• Old government IT finding a new face, Clement tells tech conference
• Smaller VARs may need to sub-contract from big fish on procurement: Clement
• Money-saving agency told to trim its budget: Clement

FreeBalance is also attending the FMI Professional Development Week in November (also at the Ottawa Conference Centre), where we’ll be making the Shared Services survey available to FMI attendees. Afterwards, we will share the results of the collective opinion of survey respondents. Government employees’ thoughts matter and deserve to be heard and considered when shaping the future of Shared Services Canada.

As FreeBalance is a big believer in social media, especially for Government 2.0, we were also asking people at the show who had existing Twitter accounts to follow us (@freebalance). And those that didn’t, we created Twitter accounts on the spot and then showed them how to follow people on Twitter by following FreeBalance. We also have a LinkedIn Group that you can join as well, and follow us on the FreeBalance Sustainability blog.

Overall, GTEC 2011 was a successful show for FreeBalance. And we look forward to connecting with you again at GTEC 2012.

Here’s some photographs of the FreeBalance team at GTEC 2011:

Doug Hadden, VP Products

Data centre consolidation is not easy pickings

Data centre consolidation is seen as the ‘low hanging fruit’ for shared services in government. Economies of scale, lower costs, better performance. There are shared servers projects planned by the federal governments of Canada, the UK and the United States.

Beware the low hanging fruit

Sharing servers does not provide the benefits of shared services (standardization, risk mitigation, governance etc.) And, shared servers can cost governments more than the alternative: keeping data centres as they were.

Data centre consolidation is the plumbing for shared services in government. Failure to meet cost objectives in shared servers does not bode well when governments attempt more complex and valuable software shared services. That’s because of some recent shared services failures in the UK and Western Australia where shared services cost more money than non shared services. For example, the UK, “the project was due to be completed by December 2009 at a cost of £79m but actually only finished its development phase in March 2011, at nearly double that price tag – £130m.”

The potential higher cost of server farms

Where are these hidden data consolidation costs?

• Setup costs – a recent analysis by Price WaterhouseCoopers found that data centre consolidation “could eventually save between $45 million and $293 million” but at a cost of “between $145 million and $278 million in one-time costs.” Therefore, the return on investment is as low as 116% and as high as 202%.
• Management Layer - management and organizational communications costs increase to coordinate among so many government organizations.
• Personnel Costs – there can be significant re-training costs to update personnel on newer systems and support more complex network and systems management tools. The Price WaterhouseCoopers report suggested that major savings would accrue thanks to a reduction in IT staff: “the business case for this strategy, to achieve its maximum benefits, will have significant labour implications.” So, there will also be compensation packages.
• Timeliness – the time required for consolidation in any large government means an opportunity cost. New technology is rapidly being introduced. Operating systems and databases systems are being upgraded. And, new low-cost open source middleware is becoming more available. There is a risk of consolidating old technology. And, there is the further risk that many of the services contemplated to operate on the shared services can be securely and less expensively deployed on the cloud, as we see in the United States.
• Formalized SLA and QoS – the need to maintain formal service level agreements and Quality of Service requires equipment and tools. It’s one thing for a departmental server to crash.  It’s another thing altogether if the shared service isn’t consistently reliable, as we have seen with failures in Google Mail, Twitter (fail whale), Salesforce and Blackberry. Customers demand reliability – even for free services. So, this means redundancy, back-up servers, back-up centres and fault tolerance. (There was a Forrester Research report a years ago that explained the huge incremental cost to achieve “five 9’s” availability.)
• Distance – data centre consolidation extends the distance between user and server, particularly in big countries. Servers in Canada or the United States could be in different time zones than users. This often means increasing bandwidth or adding regional centres to overcome the increase in reliability and performance related to distance.
• Peak of peak activities – data centres need to be planned based on expected activity. This means the need to deploy servers to handle the highest volume. Governments operate on the same fiscal period. Therefore, an exclusive government data centre needs to be provisioned based on peak activities around government year-end. Therefore, any advantage by balancing the load across multiple servers can be negligible when the data centre is provisioned to handle peaks of 5 or 10 times the nominal volumes.
• Platforms – governments operate many unique applications because of mandates or so many “Lines of Business”. This means that any data centre consolidation requires the support of many technology platforms. This can include supporting different versions of different platforms with different fixes, security vulnerabilities, scalability profiles, and upgrade complexity.
• Virtualization isn’t magic – not all applications and platforms play nice within virtualized environments. Virtualization is not magic to balance loads across a server farm. Switch load balancing, technology capacity planning is also required. The complexity increases with numbers of platforms and apps.
• Network and Systems Management – there is likely a need for more sophisticated network and systems management tools to monitor health across the data centre requiring the creation of a Network Operations Centre.
• Root cause analysis – it can be more difficult to uncover performance and reliability root causes because of last six points. It’s easy to reboot the IIS server in the server in the wiring closet to see what happens. It’s another thing to diagnose server problems across a farm of racks filled with blades.
• Power and reliability – one of the key benefits to data centre consolidation is reduced power consumption. Except that these data centres require operating 24/7 and special power provisions and back-up generators.

Bad fruit doesn’t make good wine

I’m not saying that these ‘shared server’ initiatives in government will fail. My point: there is significant risk. And that risk pales in comparison to shared services.

Data centre consolidation success is a good sign on the way to shared services. Consolidating office systems like electronic mail, word processing and collaboration is the next stage up the vine. Although, I wonder whether deploying these as a private cloud within government because of security concerns can be justified. Gartner analyst Andrea DiMaio wonders whether this will stall movement to the public cloud when those services are secure and cost less. And the move to operational financial and human resources systems presents more risk as I described in a recent FMI presentation.

Doug Hadden, VP Products

One of my mentors described the corporate euphoria when software companies killed innovation: “the wicked witch is dead”. And all was well in Oz.

As described in our attempt at humour yesterday, Enterprise Software Lingo – what does it really mean?, “innovation” in the software industry is what you get when you acquire another company. The two largest players in this market have recently introduced innovations in “real-time analytics.” All from acquired technology rather than something developed in-house.

I’ve written a bit about this subject in Never too big to fail? What are the implications for Government IT and E in ERP – does it stand for “economies of scale”.

I want to explain why many incumbent enterprise software vendors fail to innovate and why companies like FreeBalance have taken different approaches.

The Wicked Witch

Clayton Christiensen calls it the Innovator’s Dilemma. Geoffrey Moore describes how successful companies  must achieve Escape Velocity to overcome the “pull of the past”.

I still like to think of it as the “Wicked Witch”. Innovation in many companies is seen as a witch because:

• Technically challenging with new platform require engineers to learn new skills
• New markets are less predictable than old markets
• Employees are compensated based on the old business model
• It gets outside the company comfort zone
• Conventional thinking usually trumps critical thinking
• Organizational structures restrict agility
• It bakes customization out of the product and threatens the channel’s revenue stream

Monkeys can fly?

Many people who learn about FreeBalance technology are stunned. “You created the next version of the software from scratch using modern architecture? Nobody has done that.”

Here’s the calculation that many software companies make:

• The market projection is uncertain
• No one else is doing this, so it must be a bad idea
• Analysts aren’t covering the market, so there mustn’t be a market
• Customers haven’t specifically asked for this

The reality, when you come down to it is:

• Not enough evidence that the innovation will generate results [Strawman]
• Uncertainty that this is will help the company [Cowardly Lion]
• Lack of passion for the market or the customer problem [Tinman]
• Lack of leadership to harness company resources [no Dorothy]

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

While many large enterprise software companies dither on the yellow brick road, innovation does not stand still. There are some “strategic inflection points” missed by these companies:

• Cloud computing (Software as a Service, Shared Services etc.) where large vendors struggle to deliver solutions while new companies grow rapidly
• Middleware commoditization where large vendors continue to promote proprietary middleware when standards-based and open-source middleware are almost always less expensive, more open, and more secure
• Web as platform where large vendors continue to use legacy client/server software as core, creating performance, scalability and maintainability problems

The last point is very much about the “man behind the curtain”. Sure, the latest versions of enterprise software is web-enabled. It’s just using technology that is as much as 40 years old.

We’re not in Kansas anymore

Social media enables companies to listen. Yet, if you examine the majority of corporate tweets and blogs, you’ll find a lot of talking. So, it’s no wonder that executives in these companies don’t think that customers want innovation. They’re not listening.

And, they’re not getting to the fundamental problems facing customers.

And, some are too big to care about your business.

What has FreeBalance done differently?

• Use social media to engage, listen and learn
• Create customer steering committees to tell us what our product roadmap should look like
• Change processes company-wide to solve customer issues (and we’re ISO certified for it)
• Leapfrog large vendors by using modern technology – something ideal for government and government shared services

Maybe the witch wasn’t so much wicked as misunderstood.

As a service to enterprise software users, our crack team of investigators (or instigators) has uncovered this super secret translation glossary. Be warned: you may never look at enterprise software the same! Please add to the humour (or humor, for that matter) by tweeting @freebalance and using #enswlingo hash tag. We’ll curate the best we receive.

Disclaimer: FreeBalance provides Government Resource Planning software. Exclusively government. But we love enterprise software speak and TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms).

We won’t be publishing funny definitions for enterprise software vendors. Corporations are people too.

Best practice

• What you think it means: the best way to accomplish a process in your industry
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: sorry, that’s how the software works, you’ll need to change to suit the software

Business Process Management

• What you think it means: method for articulating the business flow within a software application
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: how you change your processes to suit enterprise software

Business Process Re-engineering:

• [see best practice, BPM]

Certification

• What you think it means: method whereby consultants can prove they are competent at installing, using and managing enterprise software
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: system integrator full employment plan

Client-Server

• What you think it means: legacy method of deploying enterprise software, only in use by laggard organizations who have not upgraded to the latest web-based version
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: what actually under the covers, software that’s 20 to 40 years young. (40 is the new “innovation”)

Cloud

• What you think it means: a method to deploy software without any need for on-premises server equipment to reduce costs
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: new way to lock customers into long-term contracts

Consolidation

• What you think it means: inevitable consolidation of a growing market
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: buying more customers [see Software Stack]

Customer-Centric

• What you think it means: an approach used by enterprise software vendors to gather your requirements
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: Business model used by specialists based on the fundamental myth that software customers prefer doing business with companies who understand their business and care about them

Customization

• What you think it means: method to get the enterprise software to meet your needs that includes workflow customization, scripts, call-outs and software development
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: how system integrators make money [see Extensibility]

End-user license agreement

• What you think it means: software license agreement showing vendor and customer commitments
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: enterprise software vendor protection plan

Enterprise Architecture

• What you think it means: the underlying structure needed to meet company fault tolerance, integration, performance and scalability requirements
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: how you have to change your infrastructure to suit  enterprise software

ERP

• What you think it means: enterprise resource planning
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: enterprise rollout: pray

ERP failure

• What you think it means: problem with implementation project that resulted in not meeting time, cost or expected benefit targets
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: blame the victim: it was the customer’s fault

Extensibility

• What you think it means: ability for enterprise software to be used for other functions within the enterprise
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: the software doesn’t do what you want [see Customization]

In-memory database

• What you think it means: a method to speed up business intelligence with real-time analytics and dashboards handling “big data”
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: a way for enterprise software vendors to sell hardware too

Innovation

• What you think it means: enterprise software company R+D labs find disruptive compelling software ideas
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: what  enterprise software vendors acquire when buying smaller companies

Integration middleware

• What you think it means: special software that enables integration among applications developed on different software platforms
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: it’s been a struggle, but enterprise software vendors  finally have software acquisitions sort of working together, otherwise known as the “generally available beta”

Interoperability

• What you think it means: software from many different vendors tightly or seamlessly integrate
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: how enterprise software vendors   make it difficult to integrate with other systems

Legacy

• What you think it means: old software that is rapidly being replaced by new
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: an annuity [see Client/Server]

Master data management

• What you think it means: way to coordinate metadata and definitions across many modules in a single place
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: enterprise software modules don’t really talk to each other, so you’ll have to manage all the definitions

OOW

• What you think it means: a big enterprise software event
• What it means to enterprise software vendors :what marketers say when there is a bad keynote address by the CEO

Open system

• What you think it means: system designed to operate on many platforms and integrate with many applications
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: you’re open to buying all the enterprise software vendor’s software [see Software Stack]

Portfolio management

• What you think it means: in software, the activity of reducing the number of vendors and products to reduce maintenance and training costs
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: how enterprise software  vendors sell more software by convincing customers to buy from product portfolio

Return on Investment

• What you think it means: method whereby you can calculate the return from your enterprise software investment
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: enterprise software vendor  return on your investment

Roadmap

• What you think it means: enterprise software vendors long-term plans for new products and upgrades
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: what you’ll get when vendor decides to give it to you

Shared Service

• What you think it means: a method used by governments and large companies with a central data centre to gain economies of scale and reduce costs
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: share the risk, get no service

Shelfware

• What you think it means: software that is purchased but not used
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: a beauty to behold

Slice and dice

• What you think it means: use of multidimensional databases and OLAP to find important patterns and insight into data
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: what software maintenance contracts do to you [see Software Maintenance]

Software maintenance

• What you think it means: paying to get vendor support and upgrades for the next version
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: the enterprise software vendor cash-for-life program

Software stack

• What you think it means: the infrastructure, middleware and application software used in an enterprise
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: how enterprise software vendors lock you in, cha ching!

Sustainability

• What you think it means: ways to reduce your costs and improve your environmental footprint
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: something enterprise software vendors trying to make money from. Pay no attention to the software bloat that’s using all that energy.

Third party maintenance

• What you think it means: specialists that provide software support at a lower cost than the original vendor
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: terrible people trying to put an end to a good thing

Total Cost of Ownership

• What you think it means: calculating the true long-term costs to implementing enterprise software
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: very difficult concept, you shouldn’t really waste your time thinking about it

Two-tier ERP

• What you think it means: using a less expensive “tier 2″ ERP for some parts of the organization where “tier 1″ is not needed
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: using software that works, is less complicated and clearly doesn’t use best practices [see best practices]

User group

• What you think it means: an organization of enterprise software customers who share good practices, learn the latest, and collect feature requests for vendors
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: customer group therapy

Vertical market

• What you think it means: different industries that the enterprise software vendor serves well
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: what enterprise software vendors call something they don’t know much about

xaaS

• What you think it means: something as a service (PaaS, IaaS, SaaS) deployed on the cloud
• What it means to enterprise software vendors: long-term, more revenue with less service

Web-based

• What you think it means: modern software deployed via the web using the latest in software architectural practices
• What it means to enterprise software vendors:client server software with web front-end [see Client Server]

Knowledge and information sharing about progress in government procurement central themes of the 2011 Inter-American Network on Government Procurement (INGP) conference

Ottawa, Canada (19 October 2011) – FreeBalance, a For Profit Social Enterprise (FOPSE) software company that helps governments around the world to leverage robust Government Resource Planning (GRP) technology to accelerate country growth, is pleased to announce attendance at the Inter-American Network on Government Procurement (INGP) conference. This event will be held in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 18 to 19 October 2011. Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to modernize public procurement and institutional capacity are among the important themes of the conference. Previous conferences have taken place in Lima (2010), Mexico City (2009), Panama (2008), Paraguay (2007), Lima (2006), Atlanta (2005) and Vancouver (2004).

“We look forward to meeting delegates at the INGP conference to share government procurement transparency and modernization experiences needs in the Americas,” said Manuel Pietra, President & CEO at FreeBalance. “FreeBalance GRP solutions improve procurement effectiveness through tight controls, and transparent processes that encourages competition and fiscal discipline.”

The FreeBalance Accountability Suite offers a pure web-based platform that has been optimized for rapid government deployment and operational effectiveness. The Public Expenditure Management (PEM) modules integrate with budget controls, appropriations and cash management. Comprehensive procurement and purchasing cycles are adaptable to national procurement laws. The FreeBalance e-Procurement portal integrates seamlessly with back-office systems to maintain controls. Value for money is achieved through increased competition and transparency. The FreeBalance Government Resource Planning solution covers the entire budget cycle including financial and human resources transparency to improve governance and trust.

The FreeBalance Accountability Suite was designed for emerging economies through the support of reform and modernization. Parameters are used to configure modules to meet government needs. These parameters can be changed to reflect modernization, improvements in human capacity and changes in national law. This progressive activation makes the fully web-based FreeBalance GRP solution ideal for growing economies. 

About FreeBalance
FreeBalance helps governments around the world leverage robust Government Resource Planning (GRP) technology to accelerate country growth. FreeBalance software solutions for public financial and human resource management support reform and modernization to improve governance, transparency and accountability. Good governance is required to improve development results. FreeBalance solutions are active in 19 countries managing more than a quarter trillion ($US) in annual budgets worldwide. For more information, visit www.freebalance.com. 

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Doug Hadden, VP Products

While contemplating the state of government shared services, I was reminded of the Elvis Costello version of the song: (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding.

Which led me to remember the the Canadian and Commonwealth governance concept of Peace, Order and Good Government.

Government shared services is often presented as a magic pill to overcome myriad government challenges. Standardization is seen as the key ingredient to catalyze cost savings and performance improvement. Some go so far as to suggest that standardization will improve agility and accountability.

It’s not surprising that technology vendors that make money on shared services use a little hyperbole.

Standardization and Good Government

1. Standardization does not improve agility. The more standard the processes, the less agile the organization.
2. Standardization does not improve discretion. The more standard the processes, the less discretion public servants have to make decisions that will improve performance.
3. Standardization does not improve accountability. The more standard the processes, the less ability public servants have to demonstrate merit. Accountability requires discretion and agility.

At least standardization improves government efficiency. Or does it? Generic processes can introduce inefficiencies, can limit streamlining, can add management burden.

At least standardization improves government risk management. Or does it? Standardization can provide an atmosphere of risk adversity, reducing effectiveness and innovation.

Searchin’ for light in the darkness of insanity?

As captured by Mr. Costello’s version of the lyrics, we need to consider a shared services approach that weighs all factors. My sense is that many financial management software vendor shared services implementations lack the ability to achieve the right balance between standardization and accountability.

The ideal financial management shared services platform should adjust to the standardization – accountability balance:

• Enable thick standardization rather than thin. Thin standardization takes lowest common denominator, typically a part of a process. This often leaves orphan processes that are automated through custom development – or not automated at all. Thick standardization enables government organizations to share the processes that are appropriate.
• Respect mandate and agility. Different legal and organizational mandates mean that government organizations have many unique processes. These processes should be supported by multiple configurations. Those processes that should be standard are standardized, those that are unique remain unique. All operating in the same data centre or private cloud to achieve IT cost savings.
• Bottom-up governance. Standards must change to reflect changes in government objectives and recognition of good practices. This is enabled through governance mechanisms that adapt to real-life situations. Shared services must not be static and must not inhibit change.

Standardization, agility and accountability is serious stuff indeed.

GRP technology most cost-effective option for government financial Shared Services  

Ottawa, Canada (October 18, 2011) – FreeBalance, a Canadian software company that helps governments around the world to leverage robust Government Resource Planning (GRP) technology to accelerate growth, will share a 21^st Century vision for achieving the promise of shared services  in Canada at the GTEC 2011 conference, October 18-19, 2011 at the Ottawa Convention Centre (booth #213). Many governments have implemented hosted shared services to support more efficient and effective service delivery. Yet, hosted shared services for financial and human resources in government have had disappointing results. Expected savings have not materialized. Standardization has been difficult to achieve.

“Process standardization with sufficient flexibility to support departmental mandates is the key requirement for shared services. Standardization reduces cost for training, support and upgrading software,” said Manuel Pietra, President & CEO of FreeBalance. “Yet, standardization can introduce inefficiencies. This can make the standardization exercise difficult and expensive for governments. Government Resource Planning technology overcomes the standardization problem through configuration and provides a viable option to governments looking to accelerate speed to savings.”

The FreeBalance Accountability Suite Version 7 was designed specifically to support hosted shared services in government. The FreeBalance approach differs from traditional methods of deploying finance and human resources software in the following ways:

• Service configuration approach eliminates the burden for government organizations to customize software to meet unique needs.
• Multiple configurations operating in the same data centre enables government organizations to migrate to standard processes over time and supports unique configurations where necessary because of legal mandate.
• Modern web-based technology, rather than web-enabled, optimizes performance and reduces data centre size providing green benefits.
• Component-based Service-Oriented Architecture enables granular integration with software in use by government organizations.

The FreeBalance Accountability Suite is web-based and has been optimized for rapid government deployment, operational effectiveness and performance. FreeBalance technology supports Web Services standards that enable departments and agencies to integrate with existing ERP, HR, and other government information systems.

The FreeBalance Accountability Suite is used as a whole-of-government solution through centralized and decentralized shared services in governments around the world. Software solutions from FreeBalance are being used in 19 countries, including Antigua & Barbuda, Afghanistan, Canada, Iraq, Kosovo, Kyrgyz Republic, Liberia, Mongolia, Namibia, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Southern Sudan, Timor-Leste, and Uganda among others. FreeBalance software manages more than a quarter trillion ($US) annual budgets worldwide.

About FreeBalance
FreeBalance helps governments around the world leverage robust Government Resource Planning (GRP) technology to accelerate country growth. FreeBalance software solutions for public financial and human resource management support reform and modernization to improve governance, transparency and accountability.

FreeBalance software has also been implemented in 19 other countries around the world, including Antigua & Barbuda, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo, Kyrgyz Republic, Liberia, Mongolia, Namibia, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Southern Sudan, Timor-Leste, and Uganda. FreeBalance software manages more than a quarter trillion ($US) annual budgets worldwide.

For more information, visit www.freebalance.com. 

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Doug Hadden, VP Products

Do you get the impression that government shared services for financial or human resources management doesn’t live up to the promise. It often seems that with just a little more standardization or a few more departments, economies of scale will be achieved. Tomorrow.

It’s like the proverbial tavern sign: “free beer tomorrow”.

That’s the mood that greeted me earlier this year at an FMI conference in Edmonton. (One curmudgeon came to our booth and wondered whether I was going to talk about shared services in a positive way. It was bit of growl, actually.)

The presentation: Shared Services: We Can’t Get There from Here went well.

By “well”, I mean that there were no objects hurtled in my direction. There were many nodding heads. Could they have fallen asleep? (Perhaps they found the beer.)

Let’s Listen

It’s possible that when spending lots of time talking, rather than listening, you might get the impression that people are agreeing with you. That’s why we’re surveying public servants at the GTEC conference in Ottawa this week.

There seems to be an open secret that most financial and human resources shared services for software does not meet objectives. We’re going to test this impression through a survey at our GTEC booth. And, we’ve tried to use good practices in social science questionnaires to help us determine what the shared services experience really is. (Rather than manipulate questions to get the answers we’re looking for.)

Please, if you are at GTEC, come by our booth to fill out the survey. Even if you are using software from another vendor.