From: FederalNewsRadio.com 1500AM
By Jason Miller
Agencies soon will be able to compare specific performance measures of the federal financial management shared service providers.
The Office of Management and Budget said the information will be the difference maker between this and previous attempts to get agencies to move to shared services.
Norman Dong, the deputy controller at OMB, said the Treasury Department has been leading this effort to measure the cost of the shared services and the performance of each of the providers.
“They have been working very closely with the actual shared service providers, spending a lot of time with them and agreeing upon the specific function that should be measured,” Dong said after a presentation Thursday at the CFO-CIO Summit sponsored by the Association of Government Accountants and AFFIRM in Washington. “One example is procure-to-pay. They are making sure we have an apples-to-apples comparison, and then they are working with [the providers] to gather, identify the data to have a more complete look at both cost as well as performance.”
Dong said the goal is for those agencies buying or looking to buy financial management services to know what they are getting and for how much. OMB expects agencies to use the data to make more informed decisions about moving to one of the four federal providers. The four financial management shared service providers are the General Services Administration, the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the Interior Department’s Interior Business Center and Treasury’s Office of Fiscal Service.
Sharing of data begins this month
Treasury and OMB will begin sharing this data later this month with the four shared service providers. Then, Dong said, Treasury will share the information more broadly to current and potential shared services customers.
“We are not going into this with the assumption that shared service providers are operating at maximum efficiency,” he said. “We recognize the model makes a lot of sense, but there may be things we need to do in terms of enhancing our operational effectiveness and our efficiency among that shared service network if we are to be successful moving forward.”
OMB had limited success with shared services over the past decade. During the administration of President George W. Bush, OMB forced agencies to move to one of four payroll providers. OMB took a lighter approach with financial management, human resources, grants management and other shared services, telling agencies to move to these providers when their current systems reached the “end of life.”
While many small agencies took advantage of both federal and private sector providers, few large agencies transferred control of their systems to these organizations.
Dong said this time OMB has learned from its past mistakes, and the environment is more conducive to change with the broad acceptance of cloud computing and other new technologies.
Following up on modernization progress
Additionally, OMB mandated the use of shared services with its Share-First Strategy issued in May 2012.
As part of the strategy, OMB asked every shared service provider to develop a modernization plan to improve the delivery of their services. The administration has been meeting with the providers since last fall to ensure they are making progress on updating their systems.
The administration also established a requirement for agencies to move financial management shared services in March. A month later, OMB issued a shared services implementation guide and detailed a new database, called Uncle Sam’s List, of all available federal shared services.
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