| | jULY 20148CIOReviewPlatform Convergence, Analytics, and Mobility Drives Disruptive Business Models in GovernmentBy Niten Malik, Director, US Public Service, MicrosoftBuild the Next-Generation On-Premises and Cloud Solutions.The efforts to build sophisticated cloud or on premises solutions are often complicated by inflexible technology.These days, no organization can afford to spend millions of dollars or take decades to build and maintain even complex systems, especially cash-strapped government agencies. Government business processes are complex and often unique. They must typically meet multiple competing objectives such as balancing national security, privacy or budget constraints, changes in legislation and levels of customer service.The systems developed to meet these requirements are often difficult to maintain and costly to change. It is costly for the business to keep pace with technology innovations. This is especially true when the underlying application development platform requires customization to take advantage of technology innovations to improve its own mission. The predominant strategy for developing systems has been custom code or by modifying traditional Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) packages. However, aligning government business processes to rigidly defined out-of-the-box ERP workflows has proven expensive and time-consuming. Often, it's a profound challenge to adapt traditional ERP process flows initially developed for commercial business to the government's unique business requirements. Lack of flexibility and the high cost of customizing proprietary work-flows impede innovation and limits business processes from being optimized.To compensate for the lack of process flexibility and more closely align system capabilities to government requirements, agencies often rely on custom code. However, this is costly and time-consuming to develop and maintain. A stable of programmers creating often millions of lines of code raise the level of difficulty. Enforcing methodology, inadequate documentation, and dependence on programmers who alone understand what they've coded slow the pace of innovation. At the end, responsive technology architecture is elusive at best.Get off the ShelfThe challenge facing government programs is reducing cost and adapting to change. The business case must hinge equally on cost savings and mission reliability.Dynamics CRM is the next generation solution-development platform. While it enables unique requirements to be built in a non-proprietary language, it also offers a comprehensive set of configurable capabilities and architecture components such as security, data access, workflow, and presentation logic out of the box. This limits custom development to the system's most unique functions. Custom coding less of the required functionality from scratch reduces development and O&M cost significantly. It allows for quick implementation of requirements, thereby enabling an abbreviated change governance process, agile application development, and responsive business processes. Dynamics CRM provides a reliable framework for not only extending and scaling applications but also building multiple applications on the same platform. Fewer steps to input and retrieve information enable mobility and higher data accuracy. Solutions should use convergence of different platforms such as Share Point, Dynamics CRM, Lync, and email to help users move reliably and efficiently through the process. Further, data processing should be enabled on a Niten Malikopinionin my
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