engleski

Development of a new information system for Croatian forestry

Croatian Forestry is among the largest government owned organizations in Croatia. It is managing nearly 20.000 km2 of forests what makes more than a third of the overall state surface. Its information system development started in 1990 from PC based applications. Since then, there have been continuous developments, mostly performed by three programmers. They developed functionally and ergonomically appropriate applications but the integration is missing. A new project was launched in 2004 to provide an integrated information system. Local branch of a world-renowned consulting company performed a valuable analysis. The authors were engaged for further steps. We appreciated the analysis but objected to one of its main conclusions that an industry standard ERP solution should be purchased. We considered the gained experience of insiders and highly rated appreciation by end users regarding the applications quality as main asset to be used in the next cycle of development. On the other hand we objected the statement from the analysis that “ proprietary development is double more expensive than purchase of a renowned ERP” , as invalid for a country with salaries as the Croatian. We provided a roadmap for further development of a distributed information system based on insiders with moderate outsourcing.

forestry; distributed information system; ERP; wireless network; insourcing

nije evidentirano