Rich Sands named his SAP sys­tem Hal, after the com­put­er in 2001: A Space Odyssey. ​“It hasn’t killed any­body at the dis­trict yet, but I enjoy the name,” he said. It has run the finances at the South Flori­da Water Man­age­ment Dis­trict since 2006. For most of that time, SAP Sec­tion Admin­is­tra­tor Sands has point­ed it at some­thing far larg­er than a ledger: the 20-year cam­paign to restore the Everglades.

SAP does not open the flood­gates; a con­trol room in West Palm Beach, staffed around the clock, runs the water itself. What Hal han­dles is every­thing behind it, from the grant mon­ey at three lev­els of gov­ern­ment to the bonds it floats on Wall Street, the tax­pay­er rev­enue it col­lects, and the record that gets it past audi­tors three times a year. ​“While it doesn’t actu­al­ly open the gates, it does build, main­tain, and fund the entire sys­tem,” said Sands.

Sands is mod­ern­iz­ing Hal on two fronts: an SAP S/4HANA upgrade five and a half years ago and a recent move off the district’s servers onto SAP’s pri­vate cloud through RISE with SAP. Along­side this is a long-delayed HR over­haul, with SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors Employ­ee Cen­tral set to replace the last of the aging per­son­nel sys­tems this fall.

Ask him where the hard part lies, and he will not point to any of it. To the 11 peo­ple on his team, SAP is the whole world; to the 1,400 or so oth­ers, it bare­ly reg­is­ters. ​“They’re out there push­ing dirt, mov­ing water, and mak­ing sure we’re not flood­ed dur­ing the next hur­ri­cane,” he said. They care about get­ting their job done, not SAP. Bring­ing all of them along was the real trans­for­ma­tion, and the hard­est part still ahead of Sands is his own exit.

A Trans­for­ma­tion on Gov­ern­ment Time

The case for mov­ing was, as Sands puts it, ​“almost a com­e­dy of errors.” The dis­trict runs its own data cen­ter, and its two servers fol­lowed the long hard­ware-replace­ment cycle gov­ern­ments live with. Their oper­at­ing sys­tems were too old to sup­port a cur­rent ver­sion of SAP. The finances were strain­ing the old sys­tem just as hard.

Once it began float­ing bonds on Wall Street for the Ever­glades work, it need­ed capa­bil­i­ties the lega­cy set­up lacked. Five and a half years ago, it upgrad­ed to S/4HANA, and the HANA data­base paid off imme­di­ate­ly where the pain was sharpest. Mul­ti-year reports that once ran two hours now fin­ish in 10 or 15 minutes.

The cloud answered a longer-range wor­ry. SAP has been steer­ing cus­tomers toward the cloud and AI, and Sands did not want the dis­trict drift­ing so far off that path that catch­ing up would become a cri­sis of its own. Let a large sys­tem like an ERP fall too far behind, he explained, and the leap to catch up becomes too expen­sive to fund across fis­cal years and too dis­rup­tive to absorb at once.

AI only sharp­ened the tim­ing. ​“If you talked to us two months ago, we didn’t think AI was ever com­ing to the on-prem world,” said Sands, who want­ed his finan­cial sys­tem of record ready for it when­ev­er it came. What the move buys, as he frames it, is nev­er hav­ing to do this again. In the cloud, the dis­trict stays cur­rent with SAP and ready for the next shift in its finances, rather than face anoth­er expen­sive, dis­rup­tive lift years down the line.

In gov­ern­ment, the mon­ey comes in fis­cal-year incre­ments rather than a lump, which pushed the dis­trict toward a phased roll­out: slow­er, but eas­i­er on oper­a­tions and on a bud­get that can’t absorb a big hit in any sin­gle year. Then there is the Sun­shine Act. Any Flori­da cit­i­zen can ask to see almost any­thing the dis­trict does, and out­side audi­tors go through its books three times a year, a lev­el of scruti­ny a pri­vate com­pa­ny nev­er faces.

Lead­ing the Hors­es to Water

Change man­age­ment, in Sands’s view, is what most often sinks a project, and any­one who tells you it is not part of the work, he says, has nev­er been through a trans­for­ma­tion. He describes the job as lead­ing hors­es to water and then, hard­er, coax­ing ​“the last 90% that won’t drink.”

The work is slow and per­son­al. Sands does it face to face, sit­ting in someone’s office, clos­ing the door when he has to, talk­ing a ner­vous employ­ee down from the fear that automa­tion has come for their job. His pitch, worked out over two decades, is that automa­tion hands peo­ple back the job they actu­al­ly signed on for. Nobody took a pro­cure­ment job to rec­on­cile receipts against a bank state­ment, he points out; they took it to nego­ti­ate with ven­dors. ​“We’re upgrad­ing you to do the work that you should be doing,” he tells them. Two years on, he says, some of those peo­ple have gone back for master’s degrees.

Nowhere was the resis­tance stiffer than in HR, the district’s most change-averse cor­ner, whose staff, left to them­selves, would have kept the old SAP HR sys­tem for­ev­er. What forced the issue was a pay­roll license about to lapse. After ear­li­er attempts had failed, Employ­ee Cen­tral was the only door left. Rather than spring it on them, Sands spent years prepar­ing the ground, strip­ping out old cus­tom code and hand­ing HR a run of small­er improve­ments first.

The woman who had run pay­roll off the same 40 pages of notes for 20 years took con­vinc­ing that a sys­tem could do the job she’d always done her­self. The break­through was Pay­roll Con­trol Cen­ter, part of the S/4HANA upgrade, which took a 14-day grind, one cycle bleed­ing into the next, and hand­ed it to the machine. As Sands describes it, ​“they are press­ing Fiori but­tons as fast and furi­ous­ly as they can, and Hal is doing all the pay­roll” behind them. Five or six cycles in, dread had turned to appetite, and by the time Sands sat down at Sap­phire, HR was impa­tient for its new home in Employ­ee Central.

None of that per­sua­sion holds with­out cov­er from the top. Gov­er­nance has to be owned at the high­est lev­el, Sands argues, with the direc­tor either plain­ly behind the project or plain­ly against it, because either way you know where you stand. ​“If you’re hon­est with them, they’ll trust you,” he said, and that hon­esty is what buys him the room to force a hard change and count on lead­er­ship to hold the line when the aggriev­ed come knock­ing. ​“When you have that at the high­est lev­el, it makes change man­age­ment so much eas­i­er, because you know your boss and his boss and her boss have your back,” said Sands.

Future-Proof­ing the District

The same con­straints that shape the district’s tech­nol­o­gy shape its staffing. Sands runs about as lean a shop as an SAP prac­tice can, 11 peo­ple count­ing him­self, mind­ing a sys­tem that under­pins $1 bil­lion of con­struc­tion a year across 16 coun­ties. What makes that math work is that Hal is, in effect, anoth­er hire. Sands calls it ​“the dis­trict employ­ee that works 24 hours a day,” the one that lets a skele­ton crew run an oper­a­tion this size.

The peo­ple are the hard­er part. He gave up long ago com­pet­ing for SAP tal­ent on salary, since the expe­ri­enced ones, he said, ​“all want $200,000, and my direc­tor doesn’t come close to get­ting paid that.” That is why he has trad­ed head­count for exper­tise, fold­ing four gov­ern­ment posi­tions into two sea­soned con­sul­tants for less than the four cost him. Mon­ey is only the first prob­lem; the deep­er one is age, and the van­ish­ing pool of peo­ple will­ing to take the work at all. ​“Who in their right mind, who has a lit­tle bit of tal­ent toward SAP, would want to come be a gov­ern­ment work­er work­ing on a 10-year-old sys­tem?” he asked.

Sands’s own bench is aging along­side him. His Basis team, he said, is ​“two and a half won­der­ful peo­ple.” The one who runs every con­nec­tion into the sys­tem is 72, hav­ing put off his own retire­ment only because he alone knows how it is all wired togeth­er. The cloud move is his answer to that conun­drum. He built the new envi­ron­ment so that SAP absorbs enough of the Basis work­load for one per­son to car­ry, let­ting the job shrink grace­ful­ly as the vet­er­ans retire instead of col­laps­ing onto who­ev­er remains.

“I’m look­ing to set us up to where the dis­trict doesn’t need me any­more,” said Sands. Set­tled in the cloud, he fig­ures, the sys­tem will run smooth­ly for sev­en or eight years, long enough to recruit and sea­son the younger tal­ent the mis­sion itself should draw. That mis­sion is what brought him to the dis­trict. To a civ­il engi­neer with a master’s in hydraulic engi­neer­ing, he said, restor­ing the Ever­glades is ​“the crown jew­el of a mission.”

Asked what he would tell an agency stand­ing where he stood two decades ago, Sands starts with mon­ey. A cash-rich com­pa­ny should go big bang; a gov­ern­ment should expect to go phased. His real empha­sis, though, is the prep work he wish­es more peo­ple did up front, using the S/4HANA upgrade to clean the data and the cus­tom code first, so the move to the cloud starts from a clean core.

“If you avoid the hard parts of the trans­for­ma­tion, you’re just going to have to do them lat­er,” he said. ​“Do the work while you can.” He is doing it now, he says, so the dis­trict will not need him when he goes.