Casestudies

Project Overview:

For over four years, an integrated financial management system has been operating in the Treasury of the MOF as the core financial management information system. The objective of this system is to ensure accountability over the government's budget and expenditures including donor funds connecting all the provinces and ministries across the country.

We are asked to provide infrastructure solution for Treasury Systems Development and to Support Treasury IT Operations within the Ministry of Finance, Line Ministries and Provincial Administrations. Complete the rollout of implementation of Financial Management Information System to entire country.

Key Challenges:

The primary challenge is to complete the FMIS rollout to all provincial Mustofiats (States) and Line ministries on time and within budget under following constraints:

• Inconsistent power supply prejudicially impacting operations and development at Central Treasury
• Non-availability of power at most of provinces
• Serious technological capacity constraints
• Serious functional capacity constraints
• High attrition of civil servants
• Security issues at provinces to support FMIS operations
• Non-availability of safe transport means to travel to provinces
• Limited vendors to supply required resources and equipments at provincial Mustofiats

Solution Provided:

Assisted the Ministry of Finance of Treasury Department to further develop, enhance, and institutionalize the Financial Management Information System (AFMIS) and build capacity within the departments of the Treasury with thrust on ensuring successful rollout to the Line Ministries and provincial Mustofiats as this was the primary key to strengthen the financial management framework of the country.

Single Channel Per Carrier (SCPC) technology has been introduced to connect 34 provinces and ministries to the centralized location, upon outcome of the testing between 2 locations within the Ministry facility and SCPC was found satisfactory and the client was convinced to go ahead with this solution to take forward its rollout remaining locations of the country. On the other hand, testing of Microwave WiMAX technology was tested and found to be a feasible and optimal solution in the given scenario for connecting various Line Ministries one after other.

The pilot was success for both Provinces and Line ministries on SCPC and WiMAX respectively and the rollout initiative was set on wheels. The Financial Management Information System (FMIS) has been rolled out entire country within the departments of the Treasury.

Technology Used:

HP branded high end servers for FMIS production environment
Windows 2003 with RAID 0+1 and RAID 5
STAR topology network with Cat 6 based networking within Central Treasury
FirePass (F5) used for VPN connectivity between center and remote sites
SCPC Technology used for Provincial connections
WiMAX Technology with Point to Multi Point used for LMs connectivity
A Cisco PIX Firewall with an ISA server used for network security

Result:

Significant achievements of the technological enhancement of the FMIS infrastructure out in remote locations and its rollout as a result the government has been able to maintain a high degree of fiduciary standards with the assistance provided by follow on projects aimed at improving Financial Management in the government