Overview

The Department of Financial Services is developing a commercial-off-the-shelf PeopleSoft ERP system to support core business functions across state government.

At the most general level, Project Aspire is intended to ensure that state financial data is accurate, timely, valid, reliable, secure, auditable, relevant and easily accessible. The state's current financial systems no longer support even these basic essentials.

At a policy level, Aspire will empower state leaders with the timely and accurate financial information they need to make the decisions that affect peoples' lives.

Background
For most of the past two decades, the State of Florida has accomplished its budgeting, cash management, accounting, purchasing, payroll, and human resource functions using five stand-alone, legacy information subsystems. Although these subsystems have been maintained and incrementally upgraded, the State of Florida has neither modernized nor replaced the subsystems in a structured and coordinated manner to meet its changing and growing needs.

Issues and concerns with these subsystems, including lack of standards, lack of integration, duplication of data and effort, insufficient management level information, insufficient reporting capabilities, lack of a single chart of accounts and complex external interfaces, have developed over the decades since the systems were implemented.

For example, the current state accounting system and its chart of accounts were designed to capture expenditure information by organizational entity and object of expenditure rather than by activity or unit of output. The accounting system cannot provide policy makers information on how state agencies expend appropriated funds on their activities or how state services costs vary between program components or between state agencies.

This lack of modern financial management tools causes the users to establish shadow systems to manage their financial responsibilities as best as they can. State agencies that receive federal funds find themselves increasingly unable to satisfy federal grant and other reporting requirements. The current subsystems cannot fully exploit browser technology to conduct the high volume day-to-day data transactions input by their users. These current subsystems and business practices no longer meet the State's needs.

From its inception, Project Aspire has been in close coordination with Florida's state agencies. From agency involvement and input into the procurement process, weekly meetings with agency financial leaders to help resolve design and implementation issues, to having Agency Advocates on-site daily as part of the Project Aspire Team, state agencies are fully vested within the project. As the end users of the Aspire system, agency input and participation throughout the project are vital to determining the project's success.