SAP Presents Its Vision for Efficient Public Administration

At the 1st Croatian conference SAP for public sector ‘Vision of Efficient Integration of Public Administration – Ready for the EU!’, the company brought three of its leading experts in public administration transformation who presented the best global practices in this area.

The conference, held on Monday at the Regent Esplanade hotel in Zagreb, began with a small incident. Namely, the moderator of the conference, young SAP employee Tomislav Sokolić, fainted from excitement, and the first doctor to rush to his aid was Dragan Schwarz, State Secretary from the Ministry of Science, Education and športa.

– Interesting times are ahead of us, a crisis is coming to Croatia and we are in a situation where it is not easy to obtain funds in the public sector, so projects with a payback period of three to five years will take precedence. While the public sector is thinking about how to achieve significant savings in the future, I hope we will open topics and draw conclusions that will help it in that direction. We are opening topics and issues that will become increasingly significant for us in the future – said Igor Dropulić, director of SAP in Croatia, at the opening of the 1st Croatian conference SAP for public sector ‘Vision of Efficient Integration of Public Administration – Ready for the EU!’.

After Dropulić, Sönke Lorenz addressed the attendees, stating that from 1993 to 2008, Germany invested 2.3 billion euros in Croatia, making Germany the second largest foreign investor after Italy. On the path to the EU, Lorenz said, there are still several gaps, including public administration reform. Although he praised the progress in negotiations and reforms, he emphasized a significant lag in decentralization, which in his interpretation means that Croatia must make significant progress in public administration reform by the end of next year, with the use of new technologies being crucial to boost economic growth and gain the trust of citizens and the business community in Croatian authorities.

The conference was then addressed by leading SAP experts in the public sector: Shanti Namballa from SAP International’s Washington D.C. office for new market development, Roland Stapf, also responsible for new market development, and Martin Brown, director of the Public Services Department in SAP’s Europe, Middle East, and Africa sector.

Namballa stated that interventions in the banking sector show an increasing role of government and outlined reasons for changes and improvements in public administration. He identified agility, visibility, scalability, and innovation as success factors in changes, explaining scalability by stating that no government has achieved anything overnight, so when initiating changes, one must consider whether a model is upgradable. He presented the results of several studies, such as one on the 20 most desirable online public services or the tax simplicity ranking, where the Maldives and Ireland lead, while taxes are most complicated to pay in Ukraine and Belarus.

As one of the opportunities for modernization, he cited the example of accelerating the processes of opening and closing a company, as this period is a measure of the suitability of the entrepreneurship system.

Like Namballa, the next speaker, Roland Stapf, spoke about successful public administration reforms in Israel and the Indian city of Mumbai, which has as many as 18 million inhabitants. Stapf demonstrated a unique SAP platform that allows daily monitoring of the budget and avoids budget overruns, or deficits that are only noticed after the fiscal year closes, which Martin Brown also discussed.

The conference also reached several conclusions about the need for public finance reform to achieve more effective control and oversight of financial flows and budgets; about achieving more capable human resource management and increasing social and public responsibility, with the aim of maximizing the efficiency of citizen services. It was concluded that there is also a need for better management aimed at even easier and higher quality coordination of all state bodies, as well as a better assessment of return on investment, both socially and economically. (I. Škevin)