Unified Government Resource Planner

One unique use of databases I have ever witness at the organization I work in, is a bold project core business and technology enablement is currently working that I have not hear of in equivalent scale before is a governmental unified resource planner that connects the whole government’s ministries, agencies, authorities, and organizations in the main modules of a traditional ERP system, where it covers in highlights but not limited to:

• Human resources services across all government functions from payroll to vacation request to all government’s employees. 
• Supply chain management, that gathers, accounts, tracks, and manages all the governments assets. This module also covers unified transparent government procurement e-auction system. 
• Finance, which covers unifies governments payments, fund transfer, single treasury account, budgeting, and accrual-based government accounting, as well as debt management system, and cashflow forecasting. 

This system has a massive database which is never been tried in the region before at this scale of nation of this size and expenditure. The amount of simultaneous transaction required a unique approach towards building a quick responding relational database that will be distributed across the kingdom for various disbursed users with different backgrounds and needs.

The value of utilising such a system has been the focus of the government ever since the inception of the idea all way to day of it becoming an initiative undertaken by the ministry of finance of Saudi Arabia. The solution requires and for of a government-built cloud that has to run on a secure network and have redundancies and a data warehouse that can be used to produce and actionable Business intelligence reports to help guide decision making.

This extraordinary challenge comes in with is baggage of planning and relational database requirements as well as in memory processing of those databases to further reduce the latency on such a massive scale in even as small as planning and simulation. I am extremely excited for the results and impact of such an endeavour as we are rolling out modules, and parts of the overall system incrementally and hope that one-day such an example becomes one for the world’s to follow.

References:

Liang, Y., Qi, G., Wei, K., & Chen, J. (2017). Exploring the determinant and influence mechanism of e-government cloud adoption in government agencies in china. Government Information Quarterly, 34(3), 481-495. doi:10.1016/j.giq.2017.06.002

Alassafi, M. O., Alharthi, A., Walters, R. J., & Wills, G. B. (2017). A framework for critical security factors that influence the decision of cloud adoption by saudi government agencies. Telematics and Informatics, 34(7), 996-1010. doi:10.1016/j.tele.2017.04.010

Al-Fakhri, M. O., Cropf, R. A., Kelly, P., & Higgs, G. (2008). E-government in saudi arabia: Between promise and reality.International Journal of Electronic Government Research (IJEGR), 4(2), 59-85. doi:10.4018/jegr.2008040105

Franke, R., Kroenung, J., Born, F., & Eckhardt, A. (2015). Influential factors for E-government success in the middle east: Case study evidence from saudi arabia. International Journal of Electronic Government Research (IJEGR), 11(1), 39-62. doi:10.4018/IJEGR.2015010103

IMF, (2018). Saudi Arabia : 2018 Article IV Consultation-Press Release and Staff Report. retrieved from: https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Publications/CR/2018/cr18263-SA.ashx