VICTORIA, BC and MANCHESTER, NH — (Marketwired) — 06/18/13 — As the Federation of Canadian Municipalities noted during its recent annual conference, municipalities “provide the lion-s share of front-line services to Canadians.” One challenge facing local governments is computer software they purchased a decade ago is to be likely two or three generations outdated. As they seek to “partner for the greater good of the country,” local governments need to determine whether their legacy computer systems are holding them back, costing them more, and inhibiting their ability to serve their constituents.
The idea to replace an aging system may run into resistance, but keeping a legacy system may be riskier than to trade it with an up-to-date platform. , the North American subsidiary of UNIT4, the global enterprise software provider for Businesses Living IN Change (BLINC), has released its UNIT4 checklist that identifies four questions should ask as they evaluate whether their software platforms meet their current and future needs.
1. Maintenance costs of older systems can be many times those of modern platforms — to the point that it could actually be cheaper to roll-out a new platform than to keep sinking money maintaining an old platform that may be holding the organization back.
2. Municipal governments are affected by a huge variety of change, including new legislative controls, economic fluctuations and evolving citizen expectations. The agility to respond swiftly to such opportunities (or threats) can define the future of an organization, so agile systems are essential for success.
3. New ways of working and fast-changing technology mean that staff and constituents demand more ways of interacting with their municipality and its systems. Local governments need to support multiple access devices including smartphones and tablets and this requires systems able to easily add new access methods. Legacy systems designed before mobile apps can be hard to adapt to such new technology, requiring an ever-growing overhead of custom programming and proprietary add-ons.
4. Keeping ahead of constantly evolving threats and the need to support employees on more devices requires comprehensive and powerful security that may only be possible with modern systems and technology.
Even if staffers are used to the current processes, local governments need to look at their processes to see if the ones they have in place truly support the needs of the organization and the constituents it serves. Today, workflow systems are generally built in to allow users to map their current processes, automate as much as possible and impose standardization and best practice across their organization.
“Updated technology can help local governments achieve their current objectives. There are many important considerations to make along the way and keeping the status quo may not be the best answer. Knowing the right questions to ask is often half the battle and the UNIT4 four-point checklist provides local governments the ammunition they need to determine the best solution for their organizations,” says Greg Beaumont, Director of Canadian Sales, UNIT4 Business Software.
UNIT4 Business Software is the North American subsidiary of UNIT4, a $624 million global business software and services company that creates, provides and supports software for Businesses Living IN Change — delivered via the cloud or on-premise. It offers solutions that help these fast-changing public, private, non-profit and higher education -BLINC- organizations embrace business change — simply, quickly and cost-effectively. the company-s flagship Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) suite and its best-of-class financial management software, are used by 6000+ organizations in more than 100 countries. For more information or follow the company on , and our company .
Margaret Bonilla
Birnbach Communications
Phone: (603) 548-0693
Email:
Twitter: @Marg_Bonilla
You must be logged in to post a comment Login