4. In which ways is the initiative creative and innovative?
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1988 – Based on consultancy report on public finance system, MOF developed the first integrated version of the public finance system to improve its efficiency in managing and controlling public sector expenditure – only payroll system, financial system. Developed on CSP-IBM 4th GL language and DB 2 database. Statistical systems for other ministries.
1990– Development of payroll personnel and integrated into the ISFS. Develop the state general reserve fund portfolio management, internal deals and general ledgers
1990s -Development of debt management and taxation system
2000s – Development of vehicle management system or asset registers and maintenance of the ISFS
2010 – Consultancy work to upgrade the ISFS into an integrated ERP or eBusiness Suite and replace the HR personnel system with the Oracles HRMS
2011 – Identify gaps in the systems so as to refine the internal process and Business Intelligence (Business Objects from SAP) package to web-enabled the application.
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5. Who implemented the initiative and what is the size of the population affected by this initiative?
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The entire government sector of Oman relies of the services of this ISFS system for its efficient, accurate and transparent functioning. The ISFS serves to manage and control the entire country’s State Account. So it integrates the following stakeholders:
• Civil Ministries (e.g. Ministry of Health, Ministry of Education etc.)
• Self-accounting units (e.g. Muscat Municipality)
• Defence & National Security (DNS) (e.g. Royal Oman Police, Ministry of Defence etc.)
• Oil & Gas Sector entities of Oman
• Investment & Subsidiaries
• Banks
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6. How was the strategy implemented and what resources were mobilized?
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Ministry of Finance currently uses the Integrated State Finance System (ISFS) which was developed in-house and implemented in 1988. ISFS offers an integrated, comprehensive set of functionality aimed at automating the government accounting systems, practices and procedures at the Ministry of Finance (MoF). The main features of ISFS are: Financial accounting, Treasury and Cash flow management, Purchasing Budget recording and reporting.
Technically, the ISFS runs on IBM Z 10 systems which were written in IBM Visual Age Generator with DB2 database. It is accessible from all locations throughout Oman over a point-to-point network. The ISFS infrastructure was developed for OMR 300,000 and funded by the government and maintained internally.
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7. Who were the stakeholders involved in the design of the initiative and in its implementation?
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a. The ISFS is considered the central nervous system of the government with main veins supporting the government organisations and ministries. The centralized ISFS enables very strict Budgetary Control System; with complete freedom for users as well as control to ensure transparency and auditability of public accounts. Both the State budget and the State’s Final Accounts for the current as well as past years are available in both Excel and PDF format publicly for free download at the Ministry of Finance’s website at www.mof.gov.om in addition to electronic and printed formats. Through the system, it has successfully increased the management of accounts from about 3000 accounts before 1988 to more than 25,000 accounts in 2012.
b. The ISFS facilitates a bilingual interface in both Arabic and English to various ministerial staff. They can even access the main system from remote locations through web-interface via VPN connection, accessible only through high-secure login authorization.
c. Integrated complex budgeting functions - While the system handles current financial year’s treasury accounts against estimated allocations (for example for the year 2011), in parallel it is capable of handling budget planning based on past 12month’s estimates (for example for the year 2012, data from 1st 6 months of 2011 and last 6months of 2010 are used). Although financial accounts are closed at the year and any unused allocations are transferred back to the state reserves, long-running projects are tracked over a 5yrs period providing for handling of contractual projects as a special category. The ISFS captures financial and generates annual budgets in three levels: Revenue, Expenditure (Operational Expenditure, Capital Expenditure, Investments and Subsidies) and Financing (loans, state reserves, surplus, development bonds in local and foreign banks).
d. Another salient feature of this ISFS is the ability to account for payments made in any foreign currency and this makes is possible to account for any split payments made in multiple currencies for a single payment voucher.
e. For every Development Project of the government as stipulated within each Five Year Plan, the entire financial life cycle of the project is captured in the ISFS. All Commitments (Contract) within the projects as well as each and every payment as well as variation orders and other details can be tract across the entire lifetime of the project some of which are spread over several five year plans. On a daily basis, during its 20 minutes batch run, ISFS produces outputs detailing daily statistics on the system usage such as the following:
• The number of LPOs approved/rejected
• The number of Payment Vouchers approved
• The number of Budget Revisions approved
• The number of Revenue Vouchers approved
• The number of Journals approved etc.
Such outputs are used as useful inputs for capacity planning and online performance monitoring purposes.
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8. What were the most successful outputs and why was the initiative effective?
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• At any given time the mainframe system handling ISFS data and application processing handles between 100,000 to 200,000 task requests in real-time reliably. The technical infrastructure includes the main processing system at the Ministry of Finance site and the Disaster Recovery system at another remote and secure location.
• The ISFS chart of accounts consists of around 20,000 to 25,000 accounts along with more than 1million Transactions yearly. Over 3,000 users of various skill levels from various stakeholders use this system from remote areas of the Sultanate of Oman.
• Technical support center operates round the clock reachable through telephone lines along with some escalation triggers raised by the system automatically. The fully trained, in-house team manages both development as well system admin operations.
• A multi-layered approach security implementation includes physical, application and data security at all times. User access to ISFS is managed through admin system where user accounts are managed and authorizations for specific tasks are given in a customized menu designed as per their business process requirements.
• This system is mainframe based and is highly secured to attacks due to the strict information safety features built-in and inherent in the mainframe environment. During the entire history of the system, no external entity was ever able to hack or penetrate into this system.
• The system is available almost 24 x 7, except for about 20 minutes each day from Sunday to Thursday. The system is only unavailable when the batch posting interface runs to produce certain critical reports for the Accounts and Treasury Departments of the Ministry of Finance from 2.30-2.50 p.m. on weekdays.
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9. What were the main obstacles encountered and how were they overcome?
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a. The system had to be implemented in a very short time. The IT Team in MOF had less than 6 months to roll out the final version by 1 Jan 1988. The challenge was that it had to be roll out to the other ministries at the same time. However with co-operation and effective training and communications with the rest of the ministries and government organisations, the ISFS was implemented on 1 Jan 1988.
b. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the ICT infrastructure was still lacking in Oman. Hence, the team had to develop application that was very light using text-based application.
c. Users were technophobic. With proper training and awareness programme, MOF managed to eliminate this fear and got the users to work on the automated ISFS.
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