Welcome to the GovernERP Project

Many Motivations

This section is being worked on

Beginnings

John Harding and Tom McGee founded the GovernERP project in April 2008 after months of discussions about Open Source and agile development methodologies being used to develop software for the public sector. We have had many years experience in software design, development and project management, John mostly in the private sector and Tom mostly in the public sector.

Recently we have added an additional developer to the project and decided that a common code repository was needed and a web site with our information. Given our budgetary constraints, SourceForge seemed like the solution for us and we created all that in January 2009.

COTS Superiority and Other "Urban Legends"

The motivations for GovernERP are several and certainly include the notion held by many decision makers that commercial off-the-shelf, COTS, applications are the answer to nearly all software needs.

This notion of COTS superiority springs partly from the newsworthy failures of a substantial percentage of large development projects in the late 1980's and 1990's. Though project success rates have improved substantially since the late 1990's, the fear of failure remains. COTS applications being already written and working have less risk than a custom project.

Another advantage claimed for COTS applications is that they have features used widely in business and that government should manage more like business, etc. For accounting applications this means adding management accounting, high levels of integration, ease of reporting and other modern management techniques.

What's Wrong With The COTS Picture?

Actually there are many things right with this picture starting with the advanced features that modern COTS accounting applications have and the lower risk associated with an application having already been written versus something custom written.

What's wrong with the picture can be explained in two parts: the first is the inherent assumption that COTS accounting systems written for business substantially meet governmental budgeting and fund accounting requirements and the second is that the only alternative to a COTS application is a custom written application.

Government is Not the Same as Private Enterprise

There are several meaningful differences between COTS accounting systems for private enterprise and the needs of government including the budget process and the relationship between budget and spending authorizations, fund accounting and encumbrances, large variety of billing mechanisms unique to governments, the extent of workflow and approval mechanisms, ADA compliant (Section 508) interfaces and public access to much of the generated information.

Open Source Development is Not the Same as Custom

Open Source development is done as a cooperative venture of its participants. Custom development is done with a single customer in mind and the risk of such development is not shared. Open Source projects are done in the open with the development decisions and the development itself available to peer review. This typically leads to a better quality product and reduces project risk.

Open Source Development Model

Because governments from local to national have very similar feature needs, if not scale requirements, that are substantially different to private industry, they can take advantage of the cooperative Open Source development model. The Open Source model requires a relatively similar set of needs/requirements of its participants -- governments certainly meet this requirement.

A secondary benefit is both the initial and on-going licensing costs associated with Open Source -- there aren't any. Support costs for most open source projects will vary on the mix of commercial and cooperative support, but are generally less than for proprietary solutions.

Moving Ahead

Like almost all Open Source projects this one is motivated by the self interest of its particiants -- for various reasons it is interesting, fun and an educational endeavor for us. Make no mistake, we want to push this thing, are qualified to be designing it and believe in it. We may be in it for glory but we like our daytime jobs. The real motivation is that we believe this is the right direction for the future of public sector specific software. It is in the public's interest that systems such as these be Open Source.

If you are interested in helping, come on over to the SourceForge site and get involved. More to come!