Gov’t Starts Training Staff in Integrated Information Systems
The Federal Government, in the final stages of implementing a single system to monitor the financial records, human resources, and accounts of its different organs, started training its employees in its integrated financial management information systems (IFMIS) on Tuesday, December 7, 2010.
Ministry of Finance and Economic Development (MoFED) launched a series of training sessions on IFMIS, which cost 19 million dollars and is slotted for implementation in February 2012. The system will enable all federal public bodies and regions to use a single system with extensive facilities from one physical source. It will have a common database where all the information on payrolls, human resources, revenues, and customs will be stored and retrieved from.
This will enable MoFED to improve the quality of the nation’s financial decision making as well as obtain timely financial information, according to Tagel Molla, project manager of IFMIS for MoFED.
The government envisions this system to interface with other systems such as those in banks, customs and revenues authorities, as well as debt and aid management institutions.
This will enable the government to have all-round access to financial information, both current and past, as well as to improve economic forecasting, planning, and budgeting, according to Tagel.
To date, the ministry has been using integrated budget and expenditure system (IBEX) software, which was implemented by Harvard University. It was funded by USAID, Netherland’s Ministry for Development Cooperation, and Development Cooperation Ireland (DCI).
While the system was useful to keep track of budgets and expenditures, all government institutions had different software packages to keep track of their payrolls.
Although the project, which forms a part of the government’s Expenditure Management and Control Programme, was initiated 10 years ago, the ball got rolling only three years ago. The first two tenders MoFED had floated were not successful.
Only last year, Oracle E-Business Suit was awarded the government funded project.
Transnational Computer Technologies (TCT), a California based software development and consulting company with offices in Ethiopia and Nigeria, had won the first tender but the project never got off the ground, while no one had qualified for the second tender. Both tenders were funded by the World Bank (WB).
Oracle is to implement IFMIS through TCT at pilot federal institutions including MoFED, the ministries of Health (MoH), Education (MoE), and Civil Service (MoCS), the Ethiopian Revenues and Customs Authority (ERCA), and the Ethiopian Roads Authority (ERA), according to sources inside MoFED who were not authorised to comment. It will also be deployed in Oromia and Southern regional states, the sources revealed.
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By MAHLET MESFIN
FORTUNE STAFF WRITER
Kulfo 