Fifth Committee briefed on Umoja

On 6 October 2009, during a closed meeting of the Fifth Committee of the General Assembly, an informal briefing on Umoja was provided by Ms. Angela Kane, Under-Secretary-General for Management and Mr. Paul van Essche, Umoja Project Director, in which they introduced the draft report: First Progress Report on the Enterprise Resource Planning Project and Revised Estimates under Section 28A, and under the Peacekeeping Support Account (A/64/380).

Ms. Kane provided a concise summary of the changes that have been introduced in the new report, bringing attention to the critical state of the organization's way of doing business and the pressing need to bring about lasting change and improve our processes:

"Challenges are acute across the Organization and especially in the field. This reality jeopardizes our operability, our accountability and thereby our credibility and reputation.

The time is overdue for a renewal that will bring processes, procedures, skills and systems up to levels that are considered minimal in other professional environments."

Mr. Van Essche wrapped up the session, summarizing the primary goals of Umoja, providing tangible examples for the delegates of the Fifth Committee, and finally driving home the key message:

"In short, the recipe for success is equal parts improvements in processes, the skills of people and the use of technology. People, process, technology. Umoja redefines all three. If you take one thing away from this briefing, please let this be it. This is the essence of Umoja."

Umoja to bring great benefits to Peacekeeping

The Umoja Project will provide a number of opportunities for improving the way resources are managed in the United Nations. This article will look at some of the benefits Umoja will bring to peace operations. In 2007, Peacekeeping oversaw 114,577 personnel in 16 missions, operated more than 18,000 vehicles and 210 aircraft and ran 20 military hospitals and 230 medical clinics.

Field missions bring people, money and equipment together to deliver mandated outcomes in the host country. Unfortunately this is currently being done in the absence of critical technological support and necessary global integrated information. The entrenched silo approach creates inefficiencies and duplication of effort, which in turn increases the time and money required to deploy the right resources, to the right places, at the right time and at the right cost. This situation combined with the tough physical conditions of field missions further exasperate the day-to-day challenges faced by staff members and adversely affects morale.

Umoja will also provide integrated information for personnel and financial reporting. As a result, the ability to get people and materials on the ground, as well as sustain and manage a mission, will improve. Tools will now be available to track and manage transportation, movement of goods and procurement. With better information and more responsive procurement, the time it takes to deploy a mission will be considerably reduced.

Umoja will help by supporting business processes, re-engineered by subject matter experts working with the Umoja team, to eliminate unnecessary process steps and multiple manual data entries. The planning process will vastly improve. Increased accuracy and visibility of resources will lead to a reduction in waste and obsolescence as the identification of surplus resources will facilitate tracking and redeployment on a global basis.

Missions can experience difficulty assessing effectiveness, given that they are often operating in a vacuum. Being able to obtain good information in a timely manner will improve the accuracy and forecasting of budgets. Discrepancies between approved budgets and actual spending should diminish.

Umoja will provide a powerful means to manage resources more effectively and responsively in often fast-paced and challenging environments.

Umoja - a new way of working together

While the external environment has changed dramatically since the United Nations was founded in 1945, many of our internal ways of working are based on practices from the 1940s and '50s, supported, in some cases, by technology from the 1980s and '90s. As a result, we sometimes find it difficult to do our jobs as efficiently and effectively as we could.

As you are aware, the Secretary-General is committed to the continuous modernization and administrative reform of our organization. Umoja is at the heart of this Secretariat-wide effort. Umoja means "unity" in Swahili, and the name reflects its goals: to improve our business processes; to align them with commonly accepted best practice; and to support this with a global information management platform. All of which, will enable us to work together more effectively on behalf of our constituents and beneficiaries.

We have launched this website to provide you with general information about Umoja – the project mandate, background, purpose, progress and so on. More importantly, this website will be a two-way conversation, a virtual space for us to communicate with each other. In the coming weeks, we will add more content and launch exciting interactive features that will enable us to engage with you, the staff of the global Secretariat, in making the goals of the Umoja Project a reality.

The success of Umoja will depend to a large extent on the level and quality of engagement of the user community within the UN. The deployment of Umoja involves consulting with (and later training) staff, implementing streamlined and integrated business processes, and using modern technology to achieve greater efficiency and better service.

Welcome to Umoja. We hope you will visit us on a regular basis and participate in this exciting effort to improve the management of resources so that we can support the UN mandate more responsively and effectively. In the meantime, we invite you to learn more about Umoja and read some of the past articles published on iSeek.

Umoja runs through us

Ms. Pauline Omondi-Ingabo didn't hesitate for a moment when she read the October 2008 iSeek article announcing the competition to name the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Her entry – the word "umoja" (meaning unity in Swahili) – leapt to mind instantly; she felt it perfectly captured what the ERP was setting out to accomplish.
"When people work together towards a common goal, you get results," said Ms. Omondi-Ingabo, Administrative Assistant in the Office of the Director of the Division of Administrative Services (DAS) at the UN Office at Nairobi (UNON).

Born in Nairobi, Ms. Omondi-Ingabo joined the United Nations in August 2008. She revealed that working in the Secretariat had been a life-long dream and that she aspires to contribute to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) while serving the organization. Before joining UNON, Ms. Omondi-Ingabo had been working with the Secretariat of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI).

"Umoja" has been a guiding principle throughout her life. She is the eldest daughter of eight siblings, and she has held her family together through good times and bad. Now married and a mother of three, she stresses the need for people to support and help one another. "Umoja is dear to my heart because there is strength in unity," she affirms.

Ms. Omondi-Ingabo was ecstatic to learn that her submission had been selected. "It's like winning a gold medal! I was on cloud nine," she said, searching for words to describe how she felt upon learning Umoja had won. She wishes to express her deep gratitude to all the colleagues who cast their votes for her entry.

To celebrate the naming of the ERP project and to congratulate their colleague for her prize-winning contribution, her Office had a small get-together in Ms. Omondi-Ingabo's honor. She said of the team, "Umoja runs through them."

Her elated team members also used the occasion to discuss the name and how the project will impact them, the duty station and the larger organization. She and her colleagues were looking forward to learning more about it during the visit by members of the Umoja team to Nairobi, one of the stops on their world tour of Secretariat locations away from Headquarters.

Ms. Omondi-Ingabo said that there is excitement and anticipation amongst many of her colleagues at UNON for the improvements Umoja will bring to their work. She foresees that there will be individuals within the Secretariat who may at first resist changes to how they work, but she feels that once people understand the benefits they will embrace it.

With her background in planning and project management, Ms. Omondi-Ingabo is most looking forward to better access to accurate and up-to-date information, the ability to undertake higher quality analysis, increases in efficiency both in terms of time and money, and improved measurement of programme performance.

Ultimately, Ms. Omondi-Ingabo feels the implementation of Umoja will enable the Organization to meet more of its goals and help more people. "When people come together, they can move mountains. So let’s make it happen."

Originally published on iSeek on Thursday, 12 March 2009, Nairobi

Umoja team embarks on first "world tour"

Members of the Umoja project team have embarked on a "world tour" to meet with colleagues at offices away from Headquarters (OAHs) and field missions to wrap up the first major step in Umoja's implementation.

Once in place, the Umoja system will enable more effective management of human, financial and physical resources to support fully the needs of the United Nations. This will have been achieved by reengineering our processes and practices to be more efficient and implementing them on a single, global information system that will replace IMIS and many of the 250 administrative systems scattered across the Secretariat.

As recently announced, Umoja is the name that was selected for the United Nations enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. (Umoja to bring unity to the way we work)

Broadly, the main steps in developing Umoja are:

• analyzing current administrative processes and needs,
• designing new and more effective working methods reflecting best practices,
• developing a single global information management system to support those working methods,
• testing the solution extensively in real-life scenarios,
• training staff to use it effectively, and
• implementing it in all offices and missions.

The analysis phase is now reaching a close. While visiting approximately 20 UN entities in OAHs and field missions during February and March, Umoja staff are completing and validating the documentation of existing processes.

In the course of their travels, the Umoja team members are working with administration managers to ensure that the list of business processes across the four functional areas – finance, human resources, supply chain/logistics/procurement and central support services – is complete; to document systems, processes and databases that have not already been captured; and to seek feedback as to whether processes already recorded elsewhere in the Secretariat match their own. Colleagues in missions and OAHs are also being asked to identify challenges, risks and opportunities for improvement.

Equally important, the visits will add to a Secretariat-wide network of colleagues contributing to and supporting the implementation of Umoja.

It is not possible for Umoja staff to visit every office or mission on this trip, but colleagues in all locations will be invited to review and validate the complete set of processes captured. The team looks forward to meeting with staff in additional offices and missions in upcoming project stages.

The Umoja project is a strategic part of the UN reform initiative and enjoys the support of UN management at the highest levels. The replacement of IMIS and other legacy systems with Umoja presents a rare opportunity for the UN to improve its working methods so that it can carry out its work more efficiently in all major areas of resource management. There is great potential value to be realized by learning from good ideas that have been implemented around the global Secretariat and by harmonizing processes.

The input and participation of experienced staff members in all duty stations and missions is critical to the success of Umoja's implementation. The Umoja team is aiming to build strong relationships for the duration of the project with colleagues throughout the Secretariat. These visits are just one part of a much larger effort to ensure that the design of the system has considered the full spectrum of the Organization's needs as well as best practices in the UN system.

Originally published on iSeek on Friday, 6 March 2009, New York