Cognitive Work Support in Hybrid Public Sector ERP Environments: A Failure Mode Taxonomy and Decision Interface Design for Automated Contract Release Value Governance

Abstract

Hybrid public sector procurement environments — where a central procurement system, agency-specific enterprise procurement systems, and a financial enterprise resource planning platform operate in parallel — generate systematic contract release value synchronization failures that are structurally invisible at the point of occurrence. These failures expose state governments to over-commitment risk, obstruct valid agency procurement, and erode audit defensibility. This paper presents a novel seven-mode failure taxonomy organized across two governance failure dimensions and two agency-type boundaries, derived from multi-year forensic analysis of a live statewide multi-system procurement architecture. An automated contract reconciliation framework built on this taxonomy is described — implemented as a custom analytical transaction within the production statewide environment — achieving a reduction in reconciliation effort from three to four hours per contract tounder one minute per contract, exceeding 95 percent efficiency improvement. The framework instantiates a cross-system governance layer applying agency-type-appropriate diagnostic logic, reading close indicators from the authoritative system for each transaction channel, and structuring practitioner release value correction decisions through a human-authorized governance interface. The evidence suggests that financial control integrity in complex multi-system environments is not achievable through within-system controls alone — a finding with direct implications for cognitive work support design in high-stakes public sector financial governance contexts.