United Nations Embraces OpenSource and Agile... Not!

up to 40 full-time employees used to process interoffice and interagency vouchers

Most duty stations, and many organizational units within duty stations, contain their own stand-alone finance, human resources, supply chain, central support services and information technology areas

$76 million for "2597 work months" of system build and implementation services.

$14 million for travel, which presumes 1285 trips will be taken by "ERP team members, subject-matter experts and corporate consultants" at an average air ticket cost of $6000. Each trip will also get $202 for "terminal expenses" and $5000 for 20 days worth of per diems, for a total cost of about $11,000 per trip.

$1.8 million for office furnishings to support 234 workers, including 80 core staff, 66 subject matter experts, eight consultants and 80 system integrators, or about $7700 per person.

$6.7 million for office rental, based on an annual rate of $14,300 per person

$564,200 for long distance telephone calls, teleconferencing and videoconferencing

$18 million for hiring "limited replacements" for subject matter experts involved in the project

$16 million for software licences and maintenance fees

Ditch the travel - most of these sorts of trips are mere Junkets (and given the budget figures, business class junkets at that). Hire consultants that can work remotely with a need for high frequency face to face sessions

Ditch the "long distance telephone calls" - use Skype or another service to avoid large costs. Invest in a collaborative platform that allows for IM, voice, document sharing across large groups of users

Ditch software licenses - build on top of OpenSource tools and technology - sure there may be some customization costs but it avoids the noose of license fees and upgrade paths

Ditch the office rental - contract people that can hot desk, remote work work from somewhere other than the high rent United Nations locations

"Subject matter experts"? ditch that - there are a bunch of people who, for an organization liek the United Nations, would happily give some time and skill. Crowdsource the bulk of this work - faster, cheaper and generally better

"System build"? - Nope - use off the shelf OpenSource frameworks and customize to suit the use case