well-established network of professionals within the institution are valuable traits for the successful design or implementation of the new system.

Adequate senior management support is also essential. One way of showing staff the importance that senior management attributes to the project is to establish a steering committee. This and frequent progress report requirements would highly motivate them so that they carve out time for the project, meet milestones within the deadlines and feel accountable for fulfilling their responsibility.

Before deploying the software, considerable time should be dedicated to testing the new DMS.

# **V. Survey Results**

The WB conducted a survey in Spring 2017 covering 31 countries<sup>13</sup> (see the summary results in Appendix 1). The choice of countries aimed to have a fair distribution among users of off-the-shelf versus in-house built systems as well as income distribution.

The objective of the survey was to conduct a study about the core and related functions of an information system for DMOs. The institutions surveyed also responded to a variety of system satisfaction questions in order to attempt to link various parts of the survey for potential conclusions. The survey consisted of four key areas. First section concentrated on descriptive information regarding the current DMS the countries are using. The second section tried to capture the scope of functions that the DMS covers. It primarily concentrated on back office functions, such as debt recording, repayment and reporting. However, it also sought to check the functionality of the DMS with respect to middle-office (risk analysis) and front-office (borrowing operations). The next section of the survey focused on the DMS user satisfaction. Lastly, users were asked regarding various aspects of their DMS, such as technical support, resources, potential modifications and other development needs. The results will not be interpreted per section, but in conjunction in order to draw more meaningful and qualitative interpretations. The authors note that, although the participating countries were requested to fill the survey in coordination with all the units of their DMO, it was not possible to confirm this and thus the answers might be biased towards the perspective of the person submitting the response (e.g., an official from external debt team might provide favorable responses for public DMS which are strong on that area). Furthermore, given the majority of the survey respondents are from emerging and developing countries, where the public DMS are prevalent, there is not an equal distribution among the solutions assessed. Therefore, we treat the results as trends and not clear-cut conclusions. the results should be taken with a grain of salt.

The results show that 94 percent of the respondents use a software, either developed internally or purchased off-the-shelf, as a solution to capture debt management operations and functions. Only two countries covered in the survey did not have a DMS in place to record their operations. Nine of the surveyed countries use a system developed in-house, six use a commercial solution all of which are different and 17 institutions use a public DMS. The graph below shows the distribution of the DMS types.

> 13 The Republic of Georgia filled two questionnaires due to separate systems being used for external and domestic debt. Therefore, the results are based on 32 surveys.

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