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Public Sector & E Government Benefits

Enterprise time-tracking, resource scheduling and contact management software has become a necessity for Government Agencies that deal with complex resource pools and multi service environments. With increasing public expectation, smooth systems processes and reduced administration are now essential prerequisites for the delivery of a response and effective E Government services.

Government Departments, Agencies and organisations face a whole range of challenges. Many have disparate system tools, costly manual processes; slow administrative procedures and cumbersome resource tracking facilities.

These all add both financial, resource and time costs to the delivery of high quality public services. In the move to provide open and joinedup communication, E Government Departments are turning to more integrated packages that utilise the latest software technology and also enhance the drive towards the delivery of the e government strategy.

Meeting this challenge is Atlantic Global plc. Formed in 1993, Atlantic Global plc specialises in the implementation of Timesheet, Project Planning, Resource Scheduling and Contact Management solutions as part of the Atlantic Global Business software suite to a range of large blue-chip clients including: Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Worldcom, Barclays and Colt Telecommunications plc.

Atlantic Global also proudly boast within its client list a whole assortment of Government clients including London Borough of Waltham Forest, Belfast City Council, Metropolitan Police and East Riding Council.

Building E Government stratgies

According to Eugene Blaine Atlantic Global's CEO "Accurate time-tracking, resource scheduling and project accountability is fundamental to the smooth running of any organisation and effective delivery of customer orientated services. However many companies are still faced with proprietary based solutions that are expensive, difficult to implement, costly to maintain and ultimately fail to address key business process issues."

"Unlike many of its competitors, Atlantic have the ideal combination and with a globally recognised portfolio of clients together with a growing partner route to market, they are in excellent shape to satisfy the ever increasing demand in 2004 and beyond."

"Our strategy is about simplicity and is clearly in-line with e government thinking" says Eugene "We have focused on developing and delivering a software solution that is easy to use, quick to implement and above all value for money"

"From our experience it is clear that the market demands flexibility and scalability; we have therefore learned from the problems faced by our competitors by developing a nonpropriety based software solution that is designed to work and integrate with legacy systems rather than against them."

Atlantic Global clearly represents the "new bread" of web based packages by integrating and enhancing popular software packages such as Microsoft Office including MS Word and MS Project as well as providing for 3rd part integration into Oracle, SAP, Sybase, SQL, Peoplesoft, Primavera, JD Edwards and Artemis. This means that stakeholders retain empowerment over their software solutions and do not find themselves having to replace entire legacy systems at great cost.

Beyond the rhetoric of corporate promises, imaginative software terminology and policy statements, what are the practical demands facing Government stakeholders and how do vendors like Atlantic Global deal with them?

Many professional solutions come in at the £1 million mark, making them beyond the scope of all but the largest authorities and Departments. This poses serious restriction for those smaller organisations with limited budgets but with similar problems. Atlantic have found a road map that provides flexibility for small and large organizations. This has been achieved by building a lightweight cost effective software solution, which sits on top of bigger systems and is primarily designed for rapid deployment with minimal impact on the stakeholders environment. Where most vendors are talking about months of project planning, implementation and costly consultancy fees, Atlantic's method is to cut through the chaff by speaking in the language of weeks.

But the hub of the e government initiative is ultimately about ensuring that different organisations and Agencies speak together in order to deliver the most effective service to the public.

According to Eugene Blain "The task at hand is not about a 'sugar-coat' of the latest e government technologies and backed-up by a lexicon of corporate Internet jargon - those days are gone. Now it's about building flexible software that works with existing technologies and brings value add to business processes that often clearly do not work. Government like the private sector can ill afford to stand idle and bury its head in the sand."

Atlantic Global Timesheet and Project Planning is lean and is designed to bring rapid return on investment by modelling any organisational environment while simultaneously trimming the excess fat and identifying key problem areas.

Deliver effective E Government

Despite the recent information age, most Government Departments still rely on maintaining physical records and conventional paper management systems which results in lengthy form filling processes, multiple and disjointed data collection methods, ineffective control over document versions and also lost or out of date information. The aggregated cost of this is enormous. Atlantic's goal is to offer organisations tangible savings by targeting key processes and administrative areas such as reducing data collation times and paperwork, deploying electronic timesheet tracking and bringing transparency to project management pipelines.

Organisations need to keep track of decisions and transactions to meet the demands of corporate accountability and to service their own information needs. Not only is there a need to capture, manage and preserve this information within an organised system it also needs to be secure, authenticated and easily auditable.

E Government accountability

All Government Departments need to meet strict audit management standards as set out by the British Standards Institute. Tracking who's done what and when is, strategic to Atlantic's thinking. According to their IT Director Paul Gleghorn "We are suited to the e-Government strategy because our customers want secure and clearly defined management trails. We have built into our solution a secure hierarchical approval system, access control and data visibility processes that identify which users have entered information into the system. For example: external or internal clients may question an invoice and the justification of the invoice may need to be reconciled with the original timesheets. Further still the system provides annual auditors with clear management proof of where data cames from and how it was approved or modified."

Whether it is a cliché or truism the fact of the matter is that Government Departments have scarce resources. Poor management of resource allocation imposes further restrictions and ultimately costs the public money.

Atlantic Global's Marketing Director simply argues "For any service to work efficiently, having the right people on the right job at the right time is a panacea for effective service delivery."

Atlantic's approach to this problem is based on the deployment of effective resource utilisation. Through the Atlantic solution, their primary aim has been to integrate time tracking, project, contact and client information into an easily managed centralised resource schedule. The effect has been to dramatically decrease time to revenue by deploying teams with full-visibility.

It also allows stakeholders to communicate project and schedule changes, reassign key personnel and balance the overall supply and demand for resources. True quality service delivery is to know what your customers really want. Poor, disjointed or outdated structures prevent organisations from gathering service critical information at the source. Atlantic's core strategy has been to focus their software on delivering organisations with the knowledge and information to increase performance and client satisfaction through efficient integrated utilisation of time, resources and skills. By identifying which of your clients; projects and services are most profitable, this enables stakeholders to make informed decisions about where to concentrate your business-building efforts.

Building E Government sucess

All this said it is easy to forget the front line troops amidst the complexity of business management procedures and IT systems process. An often over looked e government requirement is ensuing that the solution is accessible to the end-user. Many vendors impose significant training costs when implementing an enterprise solution and many fail to take into the account the all-crucial human factor. Atlantic have a refreshing simple philosophy 'user simplicity'.

According to Euqene Blaine CEO of Atlantic Global "We build solutions that are extremely easy to use - there's no mystique, our software is designed to empower all levels of an organisation from end-users and managers right through to systems administrators.

This approach forms the core of Atlantic Global software development road map. As part of their on-going innovative drive the Atlantic Global software solution will look to extending its existing remote access capabilities with the deployment of wireless applications. Again the strategy is inline with e government thinking and is designed to anticipate future scalability and demands. Atlantic's primary goal is to provide users with convenience, immediacy and ease of use anytime and anywhere.