St.Albert, Langley tackle enterprise apps from the inside

They differ in size and complexity but the communities of St. Albert, Alberta and Langley, B.C. had similar requirements when it came to modernizing their enterprise resouce planning (ERP) systems.

It had to jibe with every department, make it easier to extract day-to-day information to create reports and make it happen relatively cheaply

And while analysts point to application service providers (ASP) as the cheap way to serve up top ERP applications on a budget, both said no to the outsourcing model.

"We were not familiar with ASPs, although we had a few people approach us on that, but we felt we'd rather have the file servers in-house and do it ourselves," said Doug Lynkowski, director of finance with the city of St. Albert, a suburb of 50,000 located just outside Edmonton.

Because the city had originally built its own in-house system, this was its first attempt at buying an ERP solution.

"We felt that rather than going with an ASP we'd keep the stuff in-house and work with it because we have an IS staff of 11 people here that we're comfortable with," said Lynkowski.

The bottom line also dictated the town's limitations in terms of which vendor they could consider. St. Albert had a budget of $1 million, including hardware support.

"We had, as everybody does, a finite set of dollars in mind in terms of a budget and being a city of about 50,000 people we couldn't really afford the SAP or PeopleSofts of the world," said Lynkowski.

The choice for both municipalities was Norwegian-based Agresso Corp. which has offices worldwide, including Richmond and Victoria, B.C. The package runs primarily in a Windows NT environment.

"We bring the flexibility of attacking a complex business requirement with scaleability and total cost of ownership a mid-size municipality can very much afford," said Charles Johnston, vice-president of sales and marketing for Agresso.

"When the user is first introduced to Agresso they can navigate their way through the application because the screens, the layout and menus are all familiar to them if they have used an office suite." That was key for both municipalities which were looking for a cost effective but uncomplicated way to update their systems.

"When we looked at Agresso we found that for a fair price they still provided all the functionality and power of the bigger guys," said Lynkowski.

Budget was also an issue for Langley, said Cliff Gittens, director of finance and corporate services for the town of 25,000 people. "We didn't have a huge megabuck budget to buy the PeopleSoft or JD Edwards packages. We were really looking for the small, tier-two package," said Gittens.

Gittens was also unaware of the ASP model - and that doesn't come as a surprise to IDC Canada senior analyst and ASP program manager Lise Dellazizzo, who says government agencies aren't proving to be early adopters of the ASP model. And even if they are aware of ASPs, the concerns that have kept mainstream business from investigating the concept apply even more so with government.

"Things like security issues - where is the data centre? How are you protecting my data? Governments or ministries would have to be very sensitive when it comes to that," said Dellazizzo.

By Jennifer Brown

Special to Technology in Government

Copyright Plesman Publications Ltd. Jan 2001
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