Friday, December 21, 2012

Putting Financial Data in the Cloud | Articles | FutureGov ...

Government Cloud

Bobby Nazief, Special Adviser at Indonesia?s Ministry of Finance talks to FutureGov about the current transitional period in Indonesia?s long term plan to consolidate all of its financial information and infrastructure in the?cloud.

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Consolidating IT?Systems

The challenge is how to integrate our IT systems. We started last year by consolidating infrastructure into the cloud. We plan to finish this stage by the middle of next year and continue with systems integration. We are in the middle of a transition. The IT system is serving the Ministry of Finance (MoF) to manage national budget, revenue collection, taxes and custom excise. However, each unit has its own IT system and?infrastructure.

The value of the national budget that we are managing is 1300 trillion IDR (US$30 billion); tax: 1000 trillion IDR (US$23 billion). If there are any issues with the system, it means that there is a potential problem with disbursement of the budget, and in revenue collection. The Finance Minister saw a centralised IT system as a big advantage in terms of quality IT management and quality of service among different?units.

Financial Management?System

The contract was signed back in 2009 and we have since had the Oracle E-business Suite (EBS) that handles the budget management from authorisation, disbursement, tax management to reporting. The EBS system is also supported by Hyperion Budget Planning. The scope is budget preparation, disbursement, and reporting. We plan to add fixed asset management, debt management and integrate these to support the fiscal system of the?MoF.

When we started the centralisation project, we didn?t know how many systems and data we could consolidate. We focused on the infrastructure and when it was ready, we asked ourselves whether we wanted to replicate what we already had. We realised that the cloud provided a better solution and we didn?t have to move the physical system. All we had to move were applications, which enabled us to allocate the physical infrastructure more?efficiently.

Initially, the cloud helped us consolidate this infrastructure, and now we are planning to ramp up cloud utilisation and move to Platform-as-a-Service. We provide the infrastructure in the centralised data centre, while the responsibility of managing the IT system is still with the specific unit. It is very much like the concept of the cloud: the owner of the system is still the individual unit, but they don?t have to worry about the infrastructure as the central IT unit is providing?it.

The issue is budgeting. Each unit is responsible for its own budget. How can you coordinate it when the system is managed by one unit, while the output will be obtained by another?unit?

We have plenty of knowledge but to provide top quality service, we do limited outsourcing. We engage experts from the private sector to work with our people for a limited time, to expedite an exchange of expertise and?knowledge.

We are aiming at finishing the consolidation next year and move all the hardware to one server room or data centre. We will also complete the rollout of the budgeting system by end of this?year.

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Source: http://www.futuregov.asia/articles/2012/dec/21/putting-financial-data-cloud/

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