An analysis of the imagine PA public sector ERP project

We have seen organizations on a global scale continue to streamline their business processes enabled by enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Despite the recent economic downturn, the public sector represents one of the largest potential areas for new ERP sales. In addition the scale of public sector ERP projects is potentially huge as evidenced by the projected ÷ for the US Navy ERP implementation and the US Army ERP implementation that is expected to include over 135,000 end users. The huge scale of these projects reinforces the need for successful ERP implementation methodologies for the public sector. Several governmental agencies in the US, Germany, Australia, and Malaysia have reported that the integration of agencies and systems in the public sector can be quite different from the private sector, requiring the use of a different approach and model. However, these agencies only attempted to implement different parts of an ERP system, whereas the US commonwealth or state of Pennsylvania is one of the first to attempt the integration of almost all of its governmental agencies with a single ERP package on a large scale. The question remains if there is a need to use a different enterprise systems implementation approach and model for a large-scale integrated ERP system in the public sector as compared to the private sector. This paper first identifies various differences in ERP implementation methodologies deployed in the public and private sectors, and then focuses on the issues and success factors of one large-scale public sector ERP project. Finally, these issues and success factors are compared to private sector ERP implementations.