WASHINGTON, DC — Jennifer Morgan, president of SAP Public Services, Inc., a subsidiary of SAP AG, testified today before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, Federal Services, and International Security. Morgan was invited to address members of Congress in a hearing titled “Innovating with Less: Examining Efforts to Reform Information Technology Spending.” The hearing explored efforts by President Obama to cut wasteful and inefficient IT spending within the federal government.
Citing advances in in-memory computing, cloud computing and mobile solutions, Morgan said: “The advances in technology over the last few years now allow government to tackle some of the largest challenges with fewer resources and shortened deployment times. A host of new technologies, specifically ones that turn large amounts of data into useful and actionable information, are transforming the way the private sector does business. Using the same technology, the government has the ability, for example, to proactively identify possible improper payments which could literally save billions of taxpayer dollars.”
A very large and growing portion of SAP’s business occurs in collaboration with its partners and, most importantly, with its customers. New solutions have to work seamlessly with legacy solutions. Vendor lock-in is “out;” co-innovation and teamwork is “in.”
“We found that the fastest and most successful results occur when industry and government co-innovate to bring new possibilities to life through technology,” Morgan said.
Some of these solutions are already at work for the American people and delivering results. “In just 22 days, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board made history by moving the tremendous amount of stimulus grant data housed on Recovery.gov to a public cloud environment,” Morgan said. Today, citizens can track spending of stimulus funds through their Recovery Explorer platform.
“More recently, the Recovery Board created FAST ALERT enabling federal agency personnel from across the government to perform large and concurrent searches though big data sets to identify potentially fraudulent entities and individuals,” Morgan added.
In the hearing, Morgan said one of the biggest challenges facing the government are IT procurement processes, which can often take longer than the modernizations themselves, “This becomes a challenge when technology innovation cycles are getting shorter and shorter, costs are going down and benefits can be achieved sometimes quicker than the acquisition process itself.”
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For more information, press only:
Atle Erlingsson, SAP, +1 (415) 858-8149, atle.erlingsson@sap.com, PDT
SAP Press Office, +49 (6227) 7-46315, CET; +1 (610) 661-3200, EDT; press@sap.com
Mollie O’Dell, Story Partners, +1 (202) 714-5993, mollie.odell@storypartnersdc.com, EDT
