Washington State: Office of Financial Management

Enterprise Architecture for an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System

The Washington Office of Financial Management was facing the prospect of replacing their aging legacy financial system. They were considering implementing a packaged Enterprise Resource Planning system for this purpose. They also recognized that such a system would need to interoperate with dozens of existing systems.

We were called in to help work through the logistics of how this interoperation could be achieved. Because of the scale of most ERP projects, most people assume that the new system will cover much more of the existing functionality and that traditional integration will be far less important. That was not what we found at all. Many of the functions of existing (and in-development) applications would not be replaced, and therefore systems integration would be a key issue. We designed a high level Enterprise Architecture both with and without an ERP package, and showed what the key messages would be.

We also did some ontological design of their coding block as the ERP system would have drastically overhauled it, and we needed to understand what aspects of it were essential going forward.