Modernizing government payroll in the cloud

Picture this. You work for an organization that pays you hourly. The bi-weekly ritual of submitting a timesheet is a given. Most of us assume we’d be submitting our time using an online portal. Simple, right? After all, we live in a digital age, where just about anything we can envision is an electronic service. But what if you lived and worked where there was no Wi-Fi, or did not have the financial resources to own a laptop?

Or, what if your employer, a government agency, has legacy technology and processes unable to provide electronic payroll functionality. It means their employees who provide various citizen services have the unenviable fortnightly task of sending paper timesheets to receive their paychecks. Can you envision how much extra effort and resources this entails—printing, paper, envelopes, postage, mailing?

In addition, all that effort doesn’t guarantee their timesheets will arrive at the processing center. Reasons for paper mail not reaching its intended location include illegible handwriting, wrong address, and improper mail handling, to name a few. Unprocessed timesheets can mean significant hardships when employees are not paid promptly, plus there’s the inconvenience of resending the missing timesheets. You get the picture.

Case in point: Modernizing government payroll

When a large U.S. state agency needed to modernize one of their core payroll system, CGI partnered with AWS to achieve the client’s vision. That vision was to deliver a consistent and positive timesheet user experience for its employees. The scope and impact was significant: 1.5 million people submitting timesheets on the same day, within a short time window, every two weeks.

To make the client’s vision a reality, we worked to provide a fully digitized web portal and mobile app for timesheet entry. Our migration and modernization experts delivered a system that provided the flexibility, scalability and security necessary to handle increased workloads. We also migrated the older payroll system to the cloud to provide elastic capacity in handling high workloads.

The transformative benefits of the cloud for the public sector

Is your public sector organization reaping the benefits of cloud solutions for essential functions like payroll? For our client, they experienced the following benefits delivered in only seven months:

• Consistent user experience for all employees, regardless of timing
• Ability to scale up and down based on the number of active users
• Elapsed times during timesheet processing decreased by five times
• Timesheet processing throughput increased by 10 times
• Cost of operations compared to on-premises decreased by 3.5 times

Like many organizations, this state agency proactively evaluated cloud computing solutions to improve their services. They've continued modernizing and migrating more workloads to AWS, reaping benefits for their operations and employee experience.

Organizations across sectors can enable employees, citizens and customers with cloud-deployed systems that deliver high value, like this public sector client. With an agile methodology and iterative value delivery, modernized cloud systems can provide enhanced user experiences and high performance at low cost. Now, that's time well spent!

Learn more about our cloud transformation and migration solutions with AWS.