The long-awaited and much-anticipated update to the basic management standards for the federal grants community is out. The Office of Management and Budget’s 2024 Revisions of the Uniform Grants Guidance aim to streamline, simplify and expand the overall reach of the $1.2 trillion in grants and cooperative assistance agencies pay out each year.

“Terms like federal financial assistance and Uniform Grant Guidance may sound mundane or, perhaps, a little bit bureaucratic. But it’s really the plumbing of our federal programs, and plumbing matters,” said Jason Miller, OMB’s deputy director for management, at an event in the White House yesterday celebrating the roll out of the guidance. “I’m particularly proud of one area of this guidance, something our team has been really focused on from the get go, ensuring that an overhaul to this guidance lowers burden on recipients. Of course, we need strong and clear rules for how federal funds are spent. But those rules should add value not create check the box burdens and red tape, even when well-intended. [Red tape] increases costs and reduces the amount of federal funding recipients can spend on delivering outcomes. Lowering burden, which is exactly what this new guidance will do, means that we get more value from every dollar, shifting minutes and shifting dollars from administrative work and overhead to mission work.”

The guidance, which hasn’t been updated since 2020 and hasn’t seen a significant update since OMB issued the initial standards in 2014, aims to revamp the grants oversight and delivery process in several ways. First, OMB says it instructs agencies to make grant announcements as clear and concise as possible. It also provides a template for agencies when developing notice of funding opportunity (NOFO).

Miller said through this streamline template, agencies are directed to use plain language and write in a manner and a level that is accessible for any potential applicant.

“We’re broadening the pool of potential recipients, for example, by ensuring federal agencies can now use languages other than English and conducting their work. The guidance has been fully rewritten from top to bottom in plain English. So it’s clear, consistent and more accessible and understandable to everyone will say the guidance, we believe strengthens accountability and integrity, accountability and burden reduction should be symbiotic not in conflict with one another,” he said. “In fact, if the language is simple. It makes compliance easier. It makes oversight more consistent, because the updated guidance fixes language that led some federal agencies to interpret the guidance differently than other federal agencies.”

HHS grants pilot shows promise

The Department of Health and Human Services recently piloted the new approach to NOFOs.

Andrea Palm, the deputy secretary of HHS, said the pilot showed that reducing the number of pages that make up NOFOs can be done and the grant still meets all the compliance and outcome goals.

“It’s been my experience at HHS, that over time, you just keep adding pieces of paper, but nobody ever looks to see which of those could be peeled back. Are they still necessary? Or is there duplication? Does it add value? Is it really helping us deliver? So really taking a look at all of those things, and only including necessary information is a way in which we can simplify this process, make it more accessible to communities all across the country and be really clear about the eligibility requirements,” Palm said. “These updates, we believe, allow for greater flexibility and a design of a NOFO that’s much more intuitive, that allows us to get really where we need to be in a more efficient way.”

OMB also believes its update will make it easier for eligible recipients, including in underserved communities, to access funding. The updates also make it easier for recipients to use federal funds to invest in the continuous improvement of their programs by using the money to support evaluation, data gathering and analysis and community engagement.

Miller said the Council of Federal Financial Assistance (COFFA), which OMB established in October, will lead the implementation of the updated guidance over the next year or more.

This update to the uniform guidance comes as the Grants modernization effort is picking up steam.

RFI to seeking feedback from providers

Andrea Sampanis, the acting director of the Grants Quality Service Management Office (QSMO) in the Department of Health and Human Services, said the guidance, a new request for information and several other initiatives are part of the long-term grants modernization effort.

The Grants QSMO released the RFI on Tuesday and it will remain open through April 30.

The QSMO will use results from the RFI as part of its evaluation of commercial options for grants management systems and services to expand and improve the current marketplace tools for federal awarding agencies to take advantage of in the coming years.

“We’ve always used Medallia software to ourselves to bring that feedback in. As we are pushing out our RFI for commercial vendor research, we’re actually updating some of the questions based on feedback we get in those Medallia surveys, either from vendors that give us feedback, but mostly from our buying agencies to make sure I’m asking the questions that they have so that they don’t have to go ask vendors all separately,” Sampanis said in an interview with Federal News Network. “This is very similar to the other one and we do this on an annual basis. Unlike the financial management QSMO which has a special item number (SIN) on the GSA schedules, our process is different. We, instead, are working with GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service on what we call the catalogue of market research. But in order to do that approach, we have to keep it up to date. So we’re going to start doing the survey every other year because in the beginning, the marketplace was changing a lot. Now I think we’re feeling good, we have a really good grasp on it. Obviously, we’ll always engage with vendors.”

Along with the RFI, Sampanis said more agencies are taking advantage of the shared services provided through the QSMO marketplace.

Migrations to shared services happening

Over the last year, the National Institutes of Health’s eRA and HHS’s GrantSolutions have brought on or started the process to bring on the departments of Commerce, Agriculture, Labor and parts of Veterans Affairs into its shared service systems.

“That said they can’t really handle all that capacity. So we’re really excited that we have partners in the commercial space to create our catalog of market research, and really help agencies save a lot of time when their needs can’t be met by the federal space. We help them save some time in acquiring those federal or those commercial solutions,” Sampanis said. “We have one quote it says working with the Grants QSMO market research puts us 1,000 steps ahead in our procurement. That’s really our goal to speed up the acquisition and give them a lot more buying confidence that they know when they go to the vendors on our catalog, they’re going to meet their standards. They’re going to be compliant with 2 CFR 200 [OMB’s new guidance]. Other people have used them. It just lets them really focus their attention on a fewer amount of providers.”

Sampanis added that the Grants QSMO team meets with the grant experts in agencies as well as agency chief information officers more and more to answer questions about the security and technology behind these shared services. And then, they help the agencies reviewing potential options when they decide its time to move off their legacy grant systems.

At Commerce, for instance, they are moving off of three custom applications that eventually will be decommissioned when they fully implement the NIH eRA system.

Labor is getting away from a 30-year-old custom built system.

Sampanis said the marketplace current includes seven grant shared services options, mainly around awards management with integrations with SAM.gov, Login.gov and Grants.gov.

The post OMB’s new guidance, RFI boost grant modernization efforts first appeared on Federal News Network.

Federal human resources employees now have a standard set of data and business elements, and performance measures to lean on as they modernize their hiring and other processes.

The HR Line of Business and Quality Service Management Office completed this year-old effort earlier this summer to update the HR business reference architecture.

Jeff Pollack, the human resources line of business program manager at the Office of Personnel Management, said these standards will bring more efficiency and better results to agency HR functions.

“It is our guiding principle for human capital management that includes the employee lifecycle. The five functional areas that encompass the employee lifecycle: Talent acquisition, talent development, employee performance management, compensation management and separation or retirement,” Pollack said in an interview with Federal News Network. “Then to complete the human capital business reference model, we’ve posted the rest of the functional areas, which included in enabling and supporting areas on Regulations.gov, those will make it to us the General Services Administration’s Unified Shared Services Management’s website in the upcoming months.”

Pollack said the business reference model includes data standards, taxonomies and process directions. The reference model falls under the Federal Integrated Business Framework (FIBF), which are the service profiles for how mission support delivers on their functional work. There are FIBF standards for financial management, cybersecurity, grants management and 10 other back-office areas. GSA created the USSM, now the Office of Shared Solutions and Performance Improvement (OSSPI) as part of the revamping of the shared services effort in 2019.

Pollack said the FIBF for human capital breaks down each portion of the human capital business reference model into different activities that need to be completed to deliver on that functional area as well as the capabilities or requirements down to the regulation, law policy level of what agencies need to deliver data standards.

“What data elements do you need in order to deliver on these standards? What are the performance metrics to determine how well you’re doing on delivering on these capabilities?” he said. “These are not system requirements. These are not IT requirements. These are requirements to deliver human capital management in the federal agencies.”

The effort to finalize the employee lifecycle functional areas started in January and culminated in August with the posting of the final standards.

The interagency effort included feedback from industry providers, sought to ensure they were inline with current policy as well as the users themselves.

Pollack said once the working group completed the initial draft, the OPM policy office approved the document, and then the HR LOB posted it on the OMB max.gov site to gather further comments. Finally, the HR LOB sent the standards out for public comment on Regulations.gov. Pollack said what comes from that are these final standards, which is a living document and will be updated over time.

Reference model as a checklist

In the meantime, agencies already are taking advantage of the new standards and business processes.

Steve Krauss, the senior advisor for the HR Quality Service Management Office (QSMO) and the HR LOB at OPM, said some are using the HCBRM to compare against their own HR organizations and functions, almost using them as a checklist.

“In the area of data standards, we’re seeing agencies and OPM really start to use the data standard as sort of a translator to be able to take the data from agency systems and compare that. OPM is building dashboards and analytic tools for governmentwide use, and these standards are becoming very influential in terms of enabling the data to be interoperable and to build governmentwide pictures of important topics like attrition, time to hire and diversity, equity and inclusion,” Krauss said. “While the standards themselves are not IT requirements, there are several efforts underway across a number of different agencies who are engaged in HR IT modernization efforts, and they are actually starting to build IT requirements using the standards as a foundation and a baseline. That is really important because that is what we’ve envisioned all along for agencies to use those standards and the common framework as a starting point and then adding more to the baseline.”

Additionally, contractors providing HR services, whether technology or professional, can use the standards in their offerings to better serve agencies, Krauss said.

Pollack and Krauss’ team are working with agencies to better understand the HCBRF and move them from development to implementation.

“We are working with the agencies who might want to put out a new contract to deliver on let’s say, workforce and performance analytics, and have baseline requirements of what that means in the federal government,” Pollack said. “It’s exciting. We’re setting up one-on-one meetings with the agencies who might be interested in following that evolution.”

Pollack said now that the Federal Integrated Business Framework (FIBF) for the employee lifecycle is complete, the HR LOB and QSMO is working on finalizing the next piece to the HCBRM, which includes the functional areas called agency strategic policy and operational plans, agency human capital evaluation, employee relations and continuous vetting, labor relations, workforce analytics, and employee records.

“These are areas that are not your hire-to-retire, but what agencies still do deliver for their employees,” he said. “We also posted in July on Regulations.gov another product called the human capital information model. This gets more into the technical area of the data standards. What the HCIM has are how those data elements exist in the ecosystem of human capital. We actually map an element to a system and form that exists so that you know when you look at the SF-75 and the SF-50, and you look at a data repository like EHRI, you know that the same element is the same element across the board. This is really important to create more confidence in the governmentwide dashboards.”

The post HR Line of Business sets ‘guiding principles’ for managing the employee lifecycle first appeared on Federal News Network.

This week on Off the Shelf,  Tim Cook, executive director of the Center for Procurement Advocacy, and Tom Sisti, executive vice president and general counsel of the Coalition for Government Procurement, provide their analysis of the key trends and takeaways from the FY23 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

Cook and Sisti discuss the key cyber and supply chain provisions of the NDAA and how they will impact government and industry.

Cook also focuses on the Congressional calendar and the timing of the key legislative actions through 2023 while Sisti gives his thoughts on the key policy issues that will shape the 2024 NDAA and beyond.

The post Key trends and provisions in the 2023 NDAA first appeared on Federal News Network.

When it comes to modernizing back office functions across the government, sometimes you have to start at the bottom.

Forget about the cloud or the modern software for a second, and focus on basic definitions.

That’s what the Office of Personnel Management is doing with the first update in five years to the Human Capital Business Reference Model (HCBRM).

Jeff Pollack, the HR Line of Business program manager at OPM, said they are focusing on those basic definitions through the draft HR Federal Integrated Business Framework (FIBF) that is out for public comment now.

“What the FIBF framework maps to is directly to the HCBRM with a unique service profile that actually identifies service activities, business capabilities, performance measures and standard data elements,” Pollack said in an interview with Federal News Network. “The FIBF service profile that’s being released, really for the first time, covers just the portion of the HCBRM that I define as the employee lifecycle, which is talent acquisition, talent development, employee performance management, compensation management and separation retirement.”

OPM has been developing the draft framework, for which comments are due by Feb. 8, for the last several years as part of the HR Quality Service Management Office (QSMO) effort.

“What we’re really looking to learn, are did we hit the mark with the standards that we have posted? Are there gaps? What are the best practices? Are the standards easy to understand? Are they implement implementable? Did we write them in such a way that as a vendor, you could look at them and say, ‘Ok, I can see where my company or my solution can deliver on these standards?’” Pollack said.

The goal is to better define the way that agencies have agreed to come together and converge on how they manage human capital management functions, said Steve Krauss, a senior advisor for the HR  QSMO and the HRLOB at OPM.

“This is really, in essence, a brand new product for a lot of people,” he said. “Over time, what this is really about is trying to get agencies to converge on particular standards in terms of how they manage these human capital functions. Then, enable industry partners who are supporting those agencies to understand those standards as well. We expect that these standards may find their way into procurement requirements and things of that nature. And that will help facilitate better dialogue and understanding across the community so that people can do the same functions the same ways.”

This is why the HR QSMO is considered a little behind on some of the others around financial management, cybersecurity and grants. The Trump administration launched QSMOs in April 2019, in an effort to centralize mission support capabilities across the federal government.

The Office of Management and Budget gave OPM the lead for the HR QSMO last year.

“We brought together subject matter experts from the different governmental agencies to start building out the how you deliver the different subfunctions. Some of the feedback we received was that the subfunction doesn’t really need to exist on its own,” Pollack said. “In terms of creating the standards in the federal space, we developed working groups, and we work directly with the hands-on subject matter experts using different IT solutions and developing system agnostic requirements.”

He added the QSMO also brought in OPM policy experts to ensure the draft standards weren’t going astray of laws and regulations.

Improving the adoption of shared services

The draft framework also is a key milestone to advance the adoption of shared HR services.

Krauss said a big part of what the public release and feedback on the framework is trying accomplish, is to, both, get agencies and industry to converge on standards in terms of how they operate these human capital management functions.

The HR QSMO is developing a playbook to help agencies adopt the framework standards.

“The job of the QSMO is to stand up a marketplace of solutions and services that agencies can use to operationalize those standards. Our intent is to work with both federal and industry providers to be able to qualify various products and services and ensure that they meet the HRLOB standards. And then those products and services will become part of the HR QSMO marketplace, and agencies can rely on the fact that they have met certain qualification standards when they use them,” Krauss said. “Now, in the meantime, there are a lot of agencies that are already making plans to modernize their HR processes and their IT systems. The QSMO is already engaged with a number of agencies to help them coordinate that planning and those processes.”

Pollack added the draft framework is giving vendors and agencies to opportunity to weigh in on those standards before they are part of future technology service requirements.

“The other thing that we’re looking to do this year, or once we resolve and adjudicate the comments that we see receive on the current posting, is to post the rest of the HR Federal Integrated Business Framework (FIBF) for the HCBRM, to regulations.gov,” he said. “We mentioned that this scope is only the employee lifecycle, but we already have developed, and we do want to post the FIBF for the supporting and enabling functions. Lastly, the other big lift thing that we’d like to do is get a new version of the HCBRM out the door, and that will take a little bit of approval process and signatures within OPM as well as possibly OMB.”

First-ever HR IT inventory

While these standards and frameworks continue to come together, Krauss said the HR QSMO isn’t standing still.

He said in fiscal 2022 the QSMO, along with the General Services Administration’s IT Centers of Excellence, helped out two agencies with HR modernization plans and strategies.

“We completed the first full pass of an HR IT inventory and modernization roadmap assessment, which is to say, we actually went out and worked with all 24 CFO Act agencies and a few others besides to get a really concrete understanding of the HR IT systems, that various agencies are using and what their plans and timelines are for modernization and for upgrade,” Krauss said. “In part, because we’ve done that and develop those relationships, we have a lot of agencies that are coming to us to discuss their monetization plans, because they know that we know what’s going on throughout the community and can help advise them in that respect as well.”

What the survey showed was some agencies were using Oracle’s PeopleSoft product and are not necessarily willing to jump into the cloud and assume more risk, because their current systems are stable.

“There is a distinct group of agencies that we found that are interested in sticking with that platform for a longer period of time. But they are looking at other ways then to modernize their HR processes and to make those more agile, provide more functionality and service to their employee populations,” he said. “There are, however, a group of agencies that are interested in moving sooner rather than later, including some agencies that are not currently on PeopleSoft and have other reasons why they need to make that move sooner. We definitely see distinct populations with different needs. But as part of that, we’re also seeing how agencies do have needs that are similar to other agencies and that presents an opportunity to encourage some collaboration between agencies.”

The post Now is the time to weigh in on the future of federal HR services first appeared on Federal News Network.

The third attempt to bring some standardization to the technology that underpins the federal grant making progress is taking advantage of being the last shared service initiative out of the gate.

The Grants Quality Service Management Office is focused on offering the tools and services agencies need most based on their input and feedback.

Chad Clifford, the executive director of the Grants QSMO at the Department of Health and Human Services, said this simple, yet complex initiative will improve how agencies deliver almost $1 trillion in grants through more than 50 agencies and 1,500 authorized programs.

“We’re not trying to drive toward a single enterprise resource planning solution for grants. There’s a bunch of reasons why but mentioning just how complex grants systems are and even just the number of programs and agencies, there are some unique needs in the grants world, and we don’t know that existing shared services can meet everyone’s needs perfectly,” Clifford said on Ask the CIO. “That’s part of why we know we need to expand. We have to try to find ways to try to make sure we are focused on the customer and improving that customer experience and giving them the tools to help drive greater efficiencies for the agency, users and recipients.”

Grants is one of the largest expenditures in government, and only grew over the last three years because of the pandemic.

But the efforts to standardize and modernize the underlying technology to run grant making systems at more than a dozen agencies has sputtered over the last 20 years.

The Office of Management and Budget launched grants.gov in the early 2000s with a goal of developing a one-stop portal to manage the front end of the grant making process.

OMB then launched the grants line of business in the late 2000s to try to bring some standardization to the back end systems and create a shared services opportunity for modernization.

That effort struggled for various reasons, but with the introduction of the QSMO concept in 2019, OMB is hoping to breathe new life into shared services.

OMB already designed three other QSMOs: The Treasury Department is leading the one for financial management; the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is leading the one for cyber; and the Office of Personnel Management is leading the one for human resources.

In January 2021, OMB designated HHS to lead the Grants QSMO.

Grants system governmentwide survey

Clifford said being the last one to receive the designation has its benefits, including making the launch of the Grants QSMO marketplace last September more likely to be successful.

“This launch of that marketplace is the start. A lot of the work we’ve done to get here is important. We’ve done governmentwide surveys of grant systems at agencies, and also asked them about their anticipated needs for grants systems and for what parts of the grants management lifecycle. That’s probably the key role for the QSMO, creating and managing that marketplace,” he said. “It’s a simple innovation, but surprisingly effective is putting in one place for agency customers to see what shared services are out there. We’re providing them assurances that if they’re seeking to use different and better tools, here are some better options to consider.”

The initial marketplace includes five validated grants services, all from federal providers.

Clifford said HHS thought it was important to start with the federal providers because they already are serving several federal customers.

“We needed to understand and make sure they are still open to new customers, they want to align with us in terms of our guiding principles that we use for the Grants QSMO and help modernize and really take some ownership over how we drive improvements with the marketplace in the solutions over time,” he said. “We really want to understand how far we can go with the federal providers, and we need time to work with agency customers through surveys and one-on-one engagements to understand their needs and really try to match up can these providers provide what’s needed by those agencies.”

While the Grants QSMO finalized its official designation, Clifford said they completed what may be the first ever survey of agencies and the status of the grant systems.

“We had 10 different agencies take part in our market research and that really helped ensure the viability of some of our conclusions, and we’ve already put it into practice. Our next approach that we are thinking about is how to work with industry,” Clifford said. “What we found from surveys of agencies is there are some particular needs for small agencies with smaller budgets around the grants management lifecycle and something called the core award management. Small agencies have small budgets so they’re looking for not just cheaper systems, almost like light systems that will provide them not necessarily all the same wraparound services or functionality, but give them something cheaper because they are running today old and expensive systems.”

Three pilots with small agencies

The survey is helping the QSMO understand what the future of the shared services should look like and where industry can play a role.

“I’ve told agency executives from day one, I know that these shared services aren’t going to meet their needs all the time today. My objective is in a five-year time horizon to move forward to get to a point where we build out this marketplace and expand this marketplace in a way that we can recommend an approach to reasonably adopt a shared service with acceptable tradeoffs,” he said. “To do that, we know we’re going to need industry. We did some formal market research last year, asking industry what solutions across the grants management process and lifecycle do they have. That market research has been really helpful for us to understand what’s out there.”

Clifford added the Grants QSMO is launching three pilots with smaller agencies to test out how they can deliver some lower cost options.

“We think there’s a real value and a real customer need in that space to help drive better outcomes, just given the sheer volume of grant programs that we have across these agencies. If we can find better low costs or light solutions that we could learn from these pilots, that would be really interesting,” he said. “In terms of procurement process, they are still in control of their own procurements at this point. We are a partner, helping to learn, understand and advise them typically, as they’re developing that request for proposals.”

The second piece to the marketplace is the QSMO is providing consultant services to agencies seeking help to modernize their systems. The QSMO estimates agencies currently are managing between 150-200 different IT systems that support the grant making process.

Clifford said the QSMO has mapped the existing business framework for grants with the existing providers to give the agency customers better transparency into how they can take advantage of the marketplace.

“It’s about sharing data and information with customers in a way that helps them make better informed decisions about what to do when they have a systems need. That’s unique. That’s one of the key innovations here with the QSMO,” he said. “Our job then is to help advise them on those roles and about what tools are out there. We now better understand their needs and can help make recommendations to them about what services might be the best fit.”

The post Grants QSMO shifts latest attempt to modernize systems into next gear first appeared on Federal News Network.

Steve Krauss, a senior advisor at OPM for the HR Quality Services Management Office (HR QSMO), said the agency is taking steps to standardize human capital functions across agencies, and helping the federal government behave more like a single “enterprise customer” when it comes to buying HR solutions and services. 

OPM spent much of 2022 getting a better understanding of the state of HR IT systems across the federal government.

The Office of Management and Budget shifted oversight of the HR QSMO to OPM last year, after OMB determined the agency was better suited to lead this marketplace than the General Services Administration, FedScoop reported in April 2022. 

“There are opportunities to help the federal government speak with one voice and operate as more of an enterprise customer, if you will, with some of those enterprise suppliers. There are also, in many cases, opportunities where agencies would like to move from that sort of fragmented ecosystem, to something that is more of an end-to-end solution. And so we’re working with agencies on all of those things,” Krauss said on Dec. 8 at AGA’s 2022 Technology & Transformation Summit.

The Trump administration launched QSMOs in April 2019 in an effort to centralize mission support capabilities across the federal government. Other agencies oversee QSMOs for cybersecurity, financial management and grants management.

Krauss said all QSMOs, at their core, are focused on optimizing services and business processes.

“All of the services that agencies provide to their employees, or that the shared service providers provide to their agencies ride on technology platforms of one sort or another, and the human capital business domain is fairly complex and fragmented, compared to some of the other domains that are in the field. You’ve got core HR systems, you’ve got payroll systems, and there’s really five or six major chunks that each agency has as part of their architecture,” he said.

Krauss said the General Services Administration has developed a framework for the business and data standards that every QSMO should adhere to across their mission support domains.

To support GSA’s framework, OPM is developing adoption playbooks to help agencies implement the QSMO standards.

“If the standards are written properly and they’re easy to understand, agencies should be able to lift a lot of the information in those standards, and turn those directly into procurement requirements,” he said.

Lessons learned from HR IT roadmap

OPM spent about six months in 2022 going through an HR IT inventory and modernization roadmap with 24 CFO Act agencies, as well as a few additional agencies.

Krauss said there are lots of opportunities to help agencies help navigate the market of HR service providers.

“[We’ve] got a real inventory of what systems agencies were using to drive various parts of the human capital business model, as well as which service providers they were using to do that. We’ve got an idea of what their roadmap looks like, what they’re thinking of modernizing, what they’re happy with [and] what they’re not happy with,” he said.

Krauss said OPM, as a QSMO provider, is currently focused on providing consultative services to agencies.

“There are huge opportunities in terms of enabling agencies to do things better, more efficiently,” Krauss said.

OPM has spent the past few years developing a standards framework for the HR QSMO it leads. Krauss said the standards framework is “substantially complete,” and will be publicly released in January 2023.

Krauss said OPM is looking for industry feedback through the public release of the standards.

“That’s very important, because as government agencies, if we’re going to rely on our industry partners to provide services and goods that help us, modernize and build our human capital management capability, our industry partners need to understand those standards as well,” Krauss said. “There’s a growing sense of momentum for agencies to use those standards, and to agree to come together on those standards. And it’s our role to help them do that, and to create leverage from that.”

Krauss told Federal News Network after an AGA panel that the roadmap helps OPM a big-picture look at the state of federal HR IT systems and how agencies plan to modernize them.

Krauss said OPM, prior to the roadmap, thought a lot of agencies would probably move their HR IT systems to the cloud. However, he said many agencies using Oracle’s PeopleSoft HR management systems “are not looking to move anytime soon” to the cloud, because Oracle announced in April 2021 that it would continue to support PeopleSoft for at least another 10 years, through 2032.

Krauss said the roadmap findings mean OPM “may not push as hard to move everybody to the cloud immediately,” and focus on other ways to optimize agency HR workflows.

“A lot of agencies are kind of almost looking to stick with PeopleSoft or hunker down. As a result, one of the things that we noticed is that a number of agencies are looking to augment what they’re doing with PeopleSoft, through the use of things like low-code, no-code platforms, so they can continue modernizing their HR processes without having to do kind of a heart transplant, if you will, with [their] core HR [systems],” Krauss said.

Through the roadmap initiative, several agencies told OPM they’re looking for better options for performance management and time-and-attendance systems.

“It helped us to understand where to focus our efforts as a QSMO, if agencies are going to come to us and say, ‘I need to know what solutions you would recommend.’ We now know which areas agencies are most likely to come to ask us that question, and so we can focus our efforts there,” Krauss said.

Connecting the dots across OPM

Meanwhile, Krauss said OPM is taking steps to “connect the dots” between the parts of the agency that issue federal workforce policies, and the part of OPM running the HR QSMO and a federal marketplace of services and products.

“From a QSMO perspective, part of what we do is operate as that voice of the customer piece — helping OPM to understand what customer agencies need and are missing, and then we coordinate across offices within OPM to make sure that we can help agencies move out on those things as efficiently and effectively as possible,” Krauss said.

To help agencies looking to staff up through the $1 trillion infrastructure spending bill Congress passed last year, Krauss said OPM put together “SWAT teams” to consult with specific agencies to help them develop recruiting and hiring strategies.

Krauss said that SWAT team work included understanding agencies to hiring and workforce needs, and helping agencies better understand the hiring authorities available.

“A lot of what it takes to improve hiring in the federal government has to do with improving policy, and improving agencies’ understanding of how to make use of things like direct hiring authorities that are available to them,” Krauss said.

As part of this work, OPM has developed a community of practice for HR workflow automation. The community looks to maximize the automation of HR tasks through tools like robotic process automation and low-code platforms.

“To the extent that agencies can share these things, as opposed to having to invent that wheel all by themselves every time, you can get more for your money over the duration, through the sharing and collaboration that we’re that we’re seeing,” Krauss said.

To support the Biden administration’s focus on the future of work, OPM has also convened a human capital data analytics community of practice. Krauss said the community has nearly 300 participants across the federal government sharing dashboards and visualizations.

“The administration is very concerned about the future of work, employee engagement, employee attrition and retention. How does the way that we’ve in our workplace, in our work modes, affecting all these things, every agency is trying to figure this out on their own. But when we get together and share, we can accelerate the rate at which we understand that” Krauss said.

Krauss said OPM is also consulting with agencies and encouraging them to collaborate on shared solutions to IT modernization solutions. Many agencies, without consulting each other, have submitted similar or nearly identical IT modernization proposals to the Technology Modernization Fund, but with limited success.

“What we’re seeing, for instance, is that if a number of agencies are submitting duplicative proposals to the Technology Modernization Fund, they’re all getting evaluated by the same board, they see that they’re not going to give anybody money when everybody’s asking for the same projects. So if agencies want the TMF money, what we’re hearing is that they pretty much need to start thinking about working together,” Krauss said.

“Because we’re in an environment where agencies don’t have, as a rule, the funding that they need or that they would like to have, the best bet that we have — whether we go for TMF funding, or go to the Hill — is to be able to line up a set of agencies and say, ‘We’ve got a common set of requirements, we’ve got common needs. We think we can do it once for everybody. And by the way, once we get this done, we should be able to serve other agencies as well.’ That actually is a good pitch, quite frankly. It’s a good strategy, and so we’re working with agencies to put that together right now,” Krauss added.

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“This is a focused point of entry to selling and innovating with VA for our industry partners,” said Michael Parrish, VA’s chief acquisition officer, in a press release. “It fills a gap we’ve found in the acquisition lifecycle by creating the fusion of acquisition and innovation with this intelligent system.”

Parrish said last month that the new Pathfinder site will help vendors that haven’t worked with VA before getting certified through SAM.gov. But the site will also pre-filter to show only VA-specific solicitations.

“One of the great things about [the Pathfinder tool] is that it does provide a connection to that more innovative area,” said Charles Worthington, chief technology officer for VA’s Office of Information Technology. “So in cases where it’s a solution that the community thinks might help solve a problem that VA has, there is a path that it’ll lead you down, that can kind of flag you into that.”

Luwanda Jones, deputy chief information officer at VA, said during a VA Advanced Planning Brief to Industry on June 8 that the site will also facilitate vendor engagement scheduling. Eventually, she said, it will replace the VA’s IT Vendor Management Office scheduling email.

But Pathfinder isn’t the only way VA is trying to make it easier for vendors to work with them. Worthington said VA is trying to build a culture of transparency on the IT side, especially with vendors, in order to make it easier for them to integrate solutions. That’s evidenced in the new Lighthouse program, Worthington said.

Previously, he said, the team behind Lighthouse was primarily focused on vendors building third-party applications on top of VA services. For example, that might include a veteran linking their VA medical records to an approved health care app on their phone.

But now that team is turning its focus to internal interfaces as well.

“You’re going to be seeing more about this in the coming weeks and months. But what we’re really hoping to do is for all the different systems that run within our VA internal environment, we want to document the interfaces that those systems provide, and make it easy for teams to use those interfaces,” Worthington said. “We want to focus on making it easy for teams to leverage existing capabilities that are existing in other systems. And Lighthouse is a key way that’s going to help us do that. So more to come on this but keep your eyes open. And really, teams should be thinking about the core transactional capabilities of whatever system you’re working on. Exposing those to other systems in a standard way with an API is really the approach that has been most successful for integrating systems at VA, and we’re going to be leaning into that even more with our Lighthouse Developer Experience platform.”

Worthington also mentioned a VA design portal that’s intended to provide style and format guidance to contractors working with VA, in order to match the look and feel of the VA website. The idea is to ensure consistency across all communications involving the VA. Worthington said that can range from as simple as whether or not to capitalize the V in veterans, to technical minutiae like fonts, margins and color palettes.

Finally, Worthington discussed a shared service for notifications that VA is beginning to implement on its internal network. It will allow vendors to send personalized notifications to veterans via email or text. So, for example, they can let veterans know their application was received, or their prescription was updated. Worthington said the service is already integrated with VA’s veteran profile databases, as well as with its veterans preference engines. It also has a high level of trust with email providers, meaning it’s more likely to bypass spam filters.

The post New VA portals provide simplicity, transparency to vendor interactions first appeared on Federal News Network.

This time, the renewed focus on federal shared services isn’t just about the technology.

The terms human-centered design and customer experience have crept into the ever-changing approach to providing agencies with back-office shared services.

Jeff Schramek, the deputy commissioner for fiscal accounting and shared services at the Bureau of Fiscal Service in the Treasury Department, said his goal to further evolve financial management, human resources, acquisition and travel shared services is a combination of maturing the services his organization provides and understanding the customers they serve in a more specific way.

“We have employees working for us that have the experience of working our systems, the efficiency and scalability of our programs, with the goal of being able to provide timely data and information to the agencies so they can do their work and make their decisions. So it’s really now becoming more about standardization,” Schramek said on Ask the CIO. “But we also want to know what our customer experiences through the whole process. We generally get 90% customer satisfaction in our services offerings each year, but customer service and actually customer experience are a little different. We want to make sure we’re bringing the agencies in early whenever we’re trying something new or bringing in a new system.”

Bringing in the customer early on

Understanding what the customer wants isn’t a new concept to shared services providers. In 2015, the General Services Administration launched the Unified Shared Services Management (USSM) office and added a playbook that emphasized the providers listen more to the voice of the customer.

The challenge, however, has been not just to listen to agency customers, but implementing real changes to the systems and offerings.

Schramek said the change the Fiscal Service is going through is to take a human-centered, agile design approach.

“We are bringing the customer in early to gauge what is it that they like about the system? What don’t they like about the system? What can we change?” he said. “We’re focusing our skilled employees who do business process reengineering and automation to focus on those [13 service] areas. Just recently, we did a review of the commercial accounts receivable organization, and what I like about what I heard through that process is this review was done and came up with about 10,000 labor hours of savings, and possibly over $100,000 of cost avoidance because sometimes you still use those people to do something else, but they can get off the manual processes. Also what I like about this business process servicing reengineering groups that we’re doing is they actually came back and told us where you can get your savings is using a bunch of different things. So it’s not just one tool. We are incorporating a robotic process automation bot into our reporting processes, that’s going to save 5,000 hours.”

Schramek said using RPA and other automation tools will reduce the burden on their customers and increase efficiency of the Fiscal Service’s services.

87 agency customers and growing

He said in one instance, automation will reduce the manual process of answering agency emails, of which the office gets more than 100,000 a year.

“That’s going to save over 3,500 hours if we implement that. We’ve got an automation tool in our accounting software that is kind of like a bot and that you incorporate it for reporting. That’s going to save about 1,400 hours a year,” Schramek said. “We have a lot of people who come in and start working for us, and we need to train them. Sometimes that requires a couple of weeks’ effort. There’s some training that you just need once a year so we’re building an automated video to replace some of that.”

Using automation and bots to improve financial services or human resources offerings is part of the Fiscal Service’s broader plan to improve customer experience.

And the Administrative Resource Center has plenty of customers that they hear from.

Schramek said ARC provides 87 agencies from small commissions and independent agencies to large cabinet level departments with, ranging from the departments of Treasury and Housing and Urban Development to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to the latest one coming on board this year, the Office of Personnel Management, a range of services from financial management to HR to acquisition to travel support services. He said about 50 agencies use their financial management shared services while 29 use some combination of the other offerings.

“We’re actually just finishing up a technology and data roadmap that we’ve created. What this really does is it looks at all four of our business lines, the systems in the software that we use in those four business lines, and where is the maturity level of those systems,” he said. “The good news for us from what we’re looking at is we don’t have too many that we have to really move off of and sunset. But there are a number, especially when they come out in the queue somehow that we’re going to need to make decisions: Do we stay on the version we’re on right now or do we do the investment to go and get the additional cloud based software services you can get on that? Those are the things we’re planning for.”

Data analytics on the horizon

Schramek added the roadmap also opens the door to bring more innovation into the shared services offerings. He said ARC will share their modernization and innovation plans with their customers whether it’s through the specific roadmap or through other ways is still to be determined.

Part of the roadmap is how ARC will bring more analytics to its customers. Schramek said currently his organization is providing data back to customers based on individual services whether financial management or HR.

Where ARC would like to go, he said, is for customer agencies to obtain data from all four business lines as they need it as well as provide analytics of that data.

“We can provide that information and provide them dashboards and some information back that then they can make decisions,” Schramek said. “I imagine some of our smaller commissions and agencies are probably going to use the dashboard and analytics we provide, whereas HUD and OPM would likely want to be able to get to the data and bring back to their analytics tools. But I think the data aspect is where we are going so we can give our customers timely data to the decision makers.”

Learning Objectives:

• Shared Services Provided by ARC
• Utilizing Automation in the Shared Services Realm
• Network Modernization
• Data Examination

This content is sponsored by 

The post Fiscal Service putting its customers at the center of its IT modernization efforts first appeared on Federal News Network.

The federal shared services effort is about to undergo yet another revival.

The 20-plus year initiative to get agencies to move to common, back-office systems for financial management and human resources will, once again, try to convince agencies they have the cure to the legacy system disease.

“Many of the new solutions the government is or will be working on are digital products and services. This means that they are and must be designed with certain human best practices in mind. Those include human centered design, agile delivery, and frequent iteration in response to user feedback, which is critical to the work that we do,” said Krystal Brumfield, the associate administrator in the Office of Governmentwide Policy at the General Services Administration, at the recent ACT-IAC and Shared Services Leadership Coalition 2022 Shared Services Summit. “As we work on new shared services, we also want to continue to increase the adoption of existing and established shared services. If you have worked with federal services, and some of these might sound familiar, GSA fleet smart pay and the Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) vehicle. I’m happy to report that all 24 CFO act agencies have adopted GSA SmartPay. This is a big win for shared services. We will continue to work with the senior accountable points of contact at each CFO and agency to promote federalwide shared services. We will also actively reviewing other federalwide share services to see if they are willing and meet the criteria to be included in the existing shared services portfolio.”

Brumfield joined the long-list of federal officials offering the “this time will be different” speech about shared services.

A quick history: The Office of Management and Budget kicked off this idea of shared services in 2001, added the Lines of Business initiatives in 2004 and by 2019, added at least three more memos, a new strategy, which created the quality service management office (QSMO) approach. During every one of these instantiations, the level of frustration grew among users and the number of legacy systems continued to increase.

And despite all this hard work, time and effort, many agencies still need to modernize back-office systems — financial, human resources, grants and acquisition — to name a few. The Treasury Department found in 2021 that at least 56 federal financial systems are approaching the end of their useful life.

The number of human resources systems facing a similar fate is not yet known. The Office of Personnel Management is about to launch a survey of the state of HR systems to help direct their future strategy and marketplace.

Shared services challenges remain the same

With the exception of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Homeland Security Department, the QSMO effort suffers from the same maladies as previous attempts ranging from a lack of a clear mandate to no direct funding to oversight and accountability that ebbs and flows from OMB and from Capitol Hill.

Former and current federal officials who worked on shared services say while some mandates may be necessary, the key to this effort continues to be answering the “what’s in it for me?” question.

Jacqueline Jones, the deputy assistant secretary for administrative services at the Interior Department, said at the conference shared services providers, which the Interior Business Center is a governmentwide provider, must show agencies why moving their functions to another agency will be valuable.

“Are you going to take me to the next level for data analytics? How will you support my mission in a future state? How are you keeping up with everything that seems to change?” Jones said. “What I’ve experienced is it was always ‘that’s great, but it seems repetitive’ to what the agency is already doing. So we can’t just offer repetitive work. It must be mission focused work.”

Beyond the move to four e-payroll providers in the early 2000s that OMB mandated, there are only a handful of successful financial management or human resources shared services efforts. Even the latest attempt to modernize those payroll providers fell apart in November when one of the teams that the General Services Administration awarded a place on a multiple award contract dropped out.

The question then is, why is this latest revival different?

The answer, of course, is it may not be. Hopefully, the lessons of 20 years of fits and starts will drive the new efforts in the financial management and human resources areas to start.

Financial marketplace close to launch

The financial management QSMO led by the Bureau of Fiscal Service in Treasury is furthest ahead of the other non-cyber initiatives. The Fiscal Service just finished a two-year assessment to be ready for the future of financial management.

As part of that analysis, Commissioner of the Bureau of Fiscal Service Tim Gribben decided that they needed to run this QSMO marketplace as a business.

Tami Perriello, the deputy commissioner for finance and administration at BFS, said, the marketplace will be required to be competitive, control costs, focus on quality service delivery, be innovative and constantly looking at customer experience. She said the Administrative Resource Center (ARC), where the financial management shared service offering lives, now reports directly to Gribben.

Perriello said BFS will launch the FM QSMO marketplace with public and private sector providers later this year.

“We’re establishing and, very nearly there, partnering with our colleagues at GSA a more standards-driven marketplace that’s designed to meet common needs at a baseline of capability. We are collaborating with government and industry to establish those baselines and included in them all of the things that everyone could think of, which is going to be challenging for all of you providers of services and solutions to government,” she said. “The idea behind all of this is to reduce burden on agencies to adopt these shared services solutions. If it meets the basic standards, then the fewer, more unique requirements you have can be plugged in. But you can be confident that after we’re done reviewing it and it’s available on the marketplace, that service or solution is going to meet the basic governmentwide reporting needs and capabilities that all of us have to have to meet.”

GSA and BFS announced in April it would refresh the multiple award schedule with a new special item number for financial management quality service management office (FM QSMO) core financial management solutions and IT professional services.

GSA and the QSMO will hold a webinar on May 18 for vendors to learn about the technical evaluation requirements for SIN.

GSA and Fiscal Service are trying to make sure they answer the “what’s in it for me?” question too.

Brumfield added GSA is collaborating with agency and industry partners to create a performance management framework to measure the impact of the QSMO services.

“This framework will take a balanced scorecard approach to ensure that we’re able to measure how the marketplaces are performing,” she said. “The scorecard will roll out in three phases to validate what we’re doing, to make sure that there’s value in the work that we’re doing based on industry feedback. We will modify our business standards based to allow for public comment. These standards are placed on Regulations.gov.”

Brumfield said GSA also is looking for other shared services options from agencies. But, and going back to the value comment from Jones, Brumfield made it clear that “our lens should focus on what our customers want and their experience says from start to finish, this administration is committed to building an effective, equitable and accountable government that puts the public first.”

Technology a differentiator this time?

Perriello, a former CFO at the Small Business Administration, said the value question was one she often wrestled with in that role.

She said CFOs must be able to demonstrate to leadership that moving to shared services will make the agency mission more efficient and effective.

“One of the things that new technologies has brought to us is the ability to bring disparate systems together. New technologies allow not just a general ledger sitting there with dead transactions in it, but that bring that data in with all of the loan systems, the procurement system and the other systems that are providing transactions, and looking at all of the across all of those feeder systems and bringing that data together is now possible because of the advances in technology,” she said. “But not everybody can afford to do that, so making that available is incredibly important to meet both the unique needs of an agency and to achieve the benefits of standardization that a shared services can provide.”

It’s a positive sign that GSA and the Fiscal Service are talking about the needs of the customer and taking a human-centered design approach as they develop the marketplace. But what will matter in the short term is getting agencies to buy in to that concept and get some successes from a few early adopters.

The post Another attempt to revive federal shared services first appeared on Federal News Network.

And on top of that, the Office of Personnel Management’s decision to move its Trust Funds Federal Financial System (FFS) to the Treasury Department’s Administrative Resource Center (ARC) for financial management shared services may be further complicating matters and adding to the delays.

OPM told the Government Accountability Office that FFS, which supports more than 8 million active federal employees and retirees, will not cross the IT modernization finish line until October 2023, nearly six years after the initiative began.

“Despite the progress made on the modernization, OPM began experiencing schedule impacts and increased costs. Specifically, according to OPM’s risk register, these negative impacts were due to realizing several risks, including those related to gaps in knowledge and documentation of the legacy processes, system, and associated interface needs; and OCIO resource constraints,” GAO found in a new report released Feb. 23. “In particular, staff from [the] Office of the chief information officer did not have the requisite system knowledge or documentation to support a thorough understanding of the FFS legacy system or associated interface needs. In addition, according to representatives from OPM’s OCIO, staff most knowledgeable about the FFS legacy system were no longer with the TFM Program Management Office. Further, an ARC official stated that OPM lacked adequate documentation on the legacy systems.”

GAO said the steps OPM took to resolve these issues is a major reason for the delayed schedule and cost increases.

“For example, OPM tasked ARC to reverse engineer the system’s interface requirements, build an integration layer and develop test plans and scenarios to replicate OPM business cases, increasing the cost of the modernization by $4 million,” auditors said.

Vendors, software contributed to delays

GAO delays also came from the initial contractor, which GAO didn’t name, due to software issues, including gaps in skills and knowledge.

“Specifically, the program and the vendor used different versions of the same scheduling software, which corrupted the schedule files. As a result, the program had to recreate its schedule at least twice,” GAO said. “The official also stated that OPM’s new vendor addressed the software challenge by leveraging an older version of the scheduling software that was compatible with the agency’s version and now both vendor and agency are using the same software version. According to that official, the new vendor is also working to resolve the shortcomings indicated in our initial schedule assessment.”

The new vendor seems to be Deloitte. OPM awarded the consultant company a three-year, $7 million contract in late 2019 or early 2020 for Trust Funds Modernization products and services.

A third reason for the delay is attributed to OPM and ARC’s relationship. OPM entered into an agreement in 2019 to move FFS to ARC’s technology platform, standardize business processes and take advantage of software services for the operations and maintenance of the system, while OPM performs the transactional processing.

GAO found OPM didn’t have enough funding to meet the goals of its initial roadmap. In the report, ARC’s program manager told auditors that this delay was due to ARC needing to work around OPM’s resource constraints

OPM requested $8.8 million for the FFS program in 2022. If Congress approves full funding, GAO estimates OPM will have spent $71.9 million since 2017 on this project.

Shared service transition challenges

But it’s more than a funding issue. GAO said OPM and ARC’s systems potentially have trouble sharing data.

“In order to process health benefit credit accounts, OPM’s systems need to interface with Treasury’s Automated Standard Application for Payments. According to OPM, if the agency is unable to transition this functionality to Treasury’s system, it will delay the decommissioning of the legacy system and potentially increase the costs and extend the planned schedule of the program,” the report stated. “Although OPM initially identified this risk in July 2018, it increased the rating to high risk in May 2021. To mitigate this risk, OPM planned to conduct a high-level assessment of the gaps and incorporate the additional requirements for the solution into the next migration release schedule.”

Additionally, GAO said there are gaps between OPM’s business needs and ARC’s shared services.

“According to OPM’s risk register, if gaps exist between the agency’s business needs and ARC’s solution, the program may require additional time and resources to complete the modernization, while continuing to depend on legacy systems. OPM initially identified this risk in July 2018. To mitigate this risk, OPM completed a high-level gap analysis in January 2020 (during Engagement Phase 1) and planned to conduct conference room pilots during the migration phase,” the report stated. “According to ARC officials, the conference room pilots are intended to demonstrate custom development and standard system functionality, during the migration phase. In addition, OPM baselined all release 1 requirements during the engagement phases; but did not baseline release 2 requirements. However, it planned to complete the remaining requirements definition documents during the migration phase. Further, OPM noted possible custom configurations may be needed, which could result in increased costs.”

This isn’t the first time auditors called out the FFS for its struggles.

In 2018, the OPM inspector general found OPM transferred $500,000 earmarked for the FFS modernization to the Consolidated Business System modernization effort. Congress appropriated $21 million for OPM to pay for governance, environment modernization, and business modernization, which FFS falls under.

The IG says OPM senior leadership decided to strengthen “OPM’s legacy IT environment, not the improvement of business processes through new IT solutions.”

Modernization has never been easy

For much of the past two decades, OPM has struggled to modernize mission systems like FFS. Even after the 2015 cyber breach and with millions of additional dollars from Congress, the IG found in 2017 OPM fell short on its planning for how best to use the funding and before that in 2016 saying the agency’s capital planning process was lacking.

OPM’s new CIO Guy Cavallo is trying to address many of these long-standing IT modernization challenges by moving the agency’s network infrastructure to the cloud as much as possible.

Cavallo also led the effort for OPM to win $9.9 million from the Technology Modernization Fund to accelerate its move to a zero trust architecture.

GAO made five recommendations, including developing new cost estimates, conducting a risk assessment of its migration plans and review its interagency agreement with ARC to ensure it meets both parties’ needs.

OPM said it concurred with two and partially concurred with two others, but disagreed with the recommendation that it still needs to add more cybersecurity expertise to the project. OPM said it has done that already.

The post OPM facing schedule delays, budget overruns for its trust fund modernization initiative first appeared on Federal News Network.

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Agencies and vendors using the contracts run by the General Services Administration should notice some improvements to their buying experience throughout fiscal 2022.

The Federal Acquisition Service is putting a larger focus on customer experience both on the front end systems and back end processes.

Crystal Philcox, the assistant commissioner of Enterprise Strategy Management in FAS, said the improvements coming are based on customer feedback.

Overall for both buyers and sellers, GSA wants to create more of a single entry point with single sign on both its customers to simplify their experiences.

“What we’ve heard are things like our contracting officers are generally responsive, but may be a little bit inconsistent in the information they request. We have heard from them that they’d like to see more standardization in what’s accepted by contracting officers and what they’re asking for,” Philcox said at a recent panel sponsored by AFFIRM, an excerpt of which played on Ask the CIO. “We have heard that once you try to get on our contracts that submission process, the timeline and the status is a little bit unknown. So really understanding how long that process will take and what all the steps are people are a little bit in the dark there. So we are doing some things to work on fixing that.”

Another area of focus is providing examples of completed templates to help contractors fill out forms or provide GSA with information.

“We’ve got a website here that you have to go to do that and a website here to go to do that, so having some sort of game plan or checklist around what the next steps are and having that all together in one place would be really helpful,” she said.

For buyers, Philcox said the goal is to improve the data around products and services.

“When there’s no pictures, there’s no descriptions, buyers frequently say that they have issues with some of the data and information that’s in the product catalog that they’re looking at. They say the search isn’t good, the inventory status or fulfillment information is not great, and they don’t like spending a lot of time putting orders together and then finding out later that it wasn’t in stock,” she said. “There’s a number of projects that are going on to address that. We’ve gotten a contract acquisition lifecycle management system that we’re working on right now. That is really going to fix that interaction with the suppliers, including things like being like help getting us the data and allowing us to share back, including where your solicitation is in progress.”

Philcox said many of these new tools will roll out over the next six months or so.

For example, GSA in January launched a new service under the GSA Advantage! portal that provides any details of stock disruptions from manufacturers and wholesalers reporting issues in the Verified Products Portal (VPP).

Services marketplace goals

On the back end systems, Philcox said her office is improving how data is organized and presented through a series of dashboards, which then can be shared with the broader acquisition community.

“The other thing that that data really allows us to do is to really think about our collaborative policymaking and our collaborative purchasing power to really work on some top level priorities right now, that includes strengthening cyber and its supply chain risk management. It includes promoting climate friendly purchasing. It includes promoting compliance with Made in America policies, and focusing on creating that diverse resilient supply chain,” she said. “We know that our supply chain has been shrinking over the last several years so we’d like to try to reverse that trend. We’d like more suppliers to be able to get into the marketplace and have that supply chain really strong.”

Improving the services marketplace is another priority with short and long term goals.

Tiffany Hixson, the assistant commissioner of the Office of Professional Services and Human Capital Categories, said her focus around service contracts is similar to what Philcox mentioned around improving back office systems and supporting industry.

“We’re working through having one training session so we can issue those delegations of procurement authority in a way that it’s a one time and you’re a trained acquisition professional. It’s really us telling you how to use these contract vehicles, how can we do that together,” she said. “We’re coming together to think through how to have one place that you can come in, ask those questions and get really feedback from experts on our staff in terms of how to use those contracts.”

In fact, Laura Stanton, the assistant commissioner of the Office of the IT Category, wrote in a blog post on Feb. 17 that GSA started standardizing the scope review process and created a digital tool/portal so customers can submit their scope review requests.

“This will allow for better tracking, management, and coordination across portfolios, as well as create a single customer experience. PSHC has already created a pilot single intake form and we are working to integrate that across other portfolios,” she wrote. “In the coming months, we’ll launch a single delegation of procurement authority training for OASIS and Human Capital and Training Solutions and a single on-demand ITC DPA, which combines 8(a) STARS III, VETS 2, and Alliant 2 to simplify the customer experience. We’ve also started the discovery phase for an order management tool for all services task orders. This will allow for better solicitation development, tracking, and task order management on GSA contracts.”

Stanton said these initiatives are examples of how ITC and PSHC are collaborating to improve buyer and seller experiences.

Updating the Calc tool

Another change coming that is focused on the agency buyer is around pricing.

Hixson said at the panel that her office is updating the Calc tool, which provides pricing intelligence.

“When that came out five years ago or so, it was really transformational in terms of providing that intelligence in a way that was searchable. Well, it’s time to refresh that work. We are working closely with Crystal’s team in thinking through how to refresh that particular dataset, how to bring in other pricing intelligence related services, that is searchable, and can help federal buyers as well as industry, benchmark their pricing in the services space,” she said.

Hixson said FAS currently has two different tools. One provides labor rates for a particular service, and the other is a price estimating tool that FAS has been testing out with the OASIS multiple award contract program.

“We’re really looking at how to align those. We will continue to start with improving labor pricing and pricing intelligence in that space. We’ve been using pricing intelligence that’s coming out of the multiple award schedule, ceiling rates that are awarded. But we’ve been collecting prices paid information on our governmentwide acquisition contracts and multiple award contracts for a number of years,” she said. “Also, the Bureau of Labor Statistics provides a whole bunch of data related to labor pricing that’s coming out of the commercial sector. So we’re looking at how do we really leverage all of those datasets to provide more pricing intelligence just in terms of labor costs that would then go into really this price estimating tool.”

Taking advantage of RPA

Philcox said part of improving the customer experience is reducing procurement lead time.

To do that, FAS is turning to robotics process automation (RPA) tools to accelerate some of the more mundane contracting paperwork.

Philcox said FAS is applying RPA to automatically fill out pre-negotiation letters for new contractors.

“We would send out a letter and our staff would normally have to dig into 6-7-8 different systems in order to look up information and pull all that into the letter. This RPA scans all of that, pulls all that information together for you so that you can very easily put together that renegotiation letter. It has saved us more than a couple of FTEs so far and we’ve just launched it,” she said. “We are continually looking for new areas to employ it. We are starting to look at machine learning too. We’re definitely using some natural language processing right now to dig out product information out of some of the data that we have. We are getting a lot more a lot smarter in how we think about data and about how to use it. We are investing in that area.”

Stanton added at the panel that every one of these efforts is about improving the process for GSA’s customers.

She said they are doing that by seeking to streamline how buyers and sellers interact with FAS across the board.

“One of the great examples that we did was commercial supplier agreements, which were taking just a significant amount of time on the terms of our staff, and we really applied a process improvement effort to be able to reduce the cycle time of those by 97%,” she said. “When we think about customer experience, we’re thinking not just about the direct contact with the customer, but we’re thinking of all of those back office processes that we’re talking about. We have an effort underway with our 2GIT to really look at how do we improve the speed of the modification process. That has tangible benefits to the customers if we’re able to do that because they’re able to access a larger product catalog that makes it easier for them to get their RFQs bids on. That’s something when we think about customer experience, I think often it haves that direct face-to-face contact, and we’re thinking about it in a much more expansive manner. We are really thinking about the life cycle of the holistic customer engagement and how they get what they need.”

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But not every user possesses the same level of technological savvy, especially for agencies with public-facing systems that must provide access for all citizens. That requires building service models that take the full range of cybersecurity awareness and education into account.

For example, the Education Department deals with more than 6,500 higher education institutions and their students. Steven Hernandez, Education’s chief information security officer, said that can require various different kinds of authentication methods.

“When we do make those tradeoffs and decisions around when we have the tech-advanced and the tech-accessible user that has the cool authenticators, we probably need less concern about the association between the authentication and the identity,” he said during a Nov. 17 webinar. “At the other end, if we have a user who’s like ‘a username and password is what I can do,’ we may bring in some additional validation for identity. For example, what street did you live on 12 years ago? What car did you own in 1984? We’ll bring in some of those additional factors to figure out is this really the identity that we think we’re working with?”

Hernandez said this can also involve partnering with other agencies to share data that can be used in authentication. For example, Education already partners with IRS around financial data in order to streamline user experience in applying for financial aid, so repurposing that data for authentication is a natural fit. But Education also has data-sharing initiatives with other partners, like the Social Security Administration. Such data-sharing agreements can both improve citizen experience and strengthen security.

That can get kind of sticky from a legal perspective though, Hernandez said. Some citizen data requires legal authority to possess, so Education can’t necessarily go asking for data over which it doesn’t have the authority. On the other hand, he said, there’s a desire not to leave anything on the table that could help strengthen security. So there’s a tightrope to be walked, which Hernandez said results in discussions with other agencies about what is and isn’t possible, usually brokered and overseen by the chief privacy officer.

But Hernandez said these kinds of discussions help to lay the groundwork for what could become a shared services model for zero trust in the future.

“I think that we already have many of those pieces in place. The other piece is we have to maintain a citizens expectation of privacy, and frankly, independence. And we need to make sure that, as we build those systems that are more combined and federated, that citizens have the opportunity to choose their level of engagement and still get the services they need,” he said. “I think that zero trust provides us with a great path forward into how we can start to provide those types of services.”

He pointed to Login.gov as a potential first step along that road. It offers citizens the ability to choose whether they want a single login identity to access a variety of government services, or if they’d rather have separate logins for each one. That can determine what services citizens get access to, and how.

“But I think that we’re starting to go down the path and identity is the right place to start and authentication is the right place to start,” Hernandez said. “And we have that with Login.gov. I think as we go forward federalwide, we’re going to see greater adoption of shared services like Login.gov. And I think that’s going to move that conversation forward.”

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Nico Papafil, director of the General Services Administration’s 10x program, said the program will fund more such ideas than ever before in fiscal 2022. 10x crowdsources ideas from federal employees and turns them into shared services.

“We’re just asking the question, ‘what problems [are you] trying to solve?’ And we actually added these investment themes to kind of create some guidelines that just show where we want to add weight for the types of ideas we want to select,” Papafil said during an Oct. 21 GovernmentCIO webinar. “And we talked about how do we help the public engage better with the government? That’s one of the themes. And we want to double down on last year’s themes about climate change, and how do we improve digital services around the climate space? And the last one is equity and delivery. How are we better, as a government, providing a more equitable service to underserved and underpopulated and underrepresented communities? And so those are the themes that we’re going to be looking at.”

Applicants have until Nov. 16 to submit ideas.

One such idea that Papafil said 10x is currently working on is called Benefits Eligibility Awareness Recognition Service (BEARS). The problem BEARS is intended to solve is that federal benefits services are siloed by agency, rather than following a human-centered design. BEARS would create one centralized resource that, without collecting personally identifiable information, would simply inform citizens what government benefits they are eligible for, and direct them to the relevant place to apply.

“So that’s a great example of a cross-agency type of tool,” Papafil said. “And I know some other folks are talking about their front doors for their agencies. And so we’re looking at it more holistically. It’s like a federal front door for certain components of what the public may need.”

It’s essentially the next step in the evolution of human centered design from what Barbara Morton, deputy chief veterans experience officer at the Department of Veterans Affairs, said the VA did back in 2018.

“That was the time, that summer of 2018, where we across VA and the Veterans Experience Office and other elements had begun to hear feedback from veterans saying, ‘Hey, it is really hard to figure out where the digital front door is at VA,’” Morton said. “And that’s sort of been a long standing pain point. But we were able to channel that, those pieces of feedback and really more deeply understand the challenge, which was there were dozens of different VA websites.”

So Morton said VA went to its customers and asked where they would start if they were looking to initiate a transaction with the VA. The answer the department got back was that VA.gov was the most common starting point.

That was the first time Morton said she was aware of a secretary-level agencywide decision made based on customer experience, but the human-centered design efforts at VA didn’t stop there. Once it was decided that VA.gov would be the agency’s digital front door, the agency realized it needed to overhaul the website itself.

“So if you had seen VA.gov a number of years ago, it would have looked very bureaucratic. And I say that with love in my heart, but it was designed from the inside out. It kind of looked like an org structure containing information that probably veterans and their families don’t really care about,” Morton said. “So we went back… in partnership with the chief technology officer and other siblings across VA, we redesigned it using human centered design. So when you see it today, you will see a much more user friendly website. Top transactions are up front, and we are codesigning and iterating all along the way with users.”

This exemplifies a point Papafil made, saying that agencies each have their own missions and customer base, and they’re all concerned with serving those customers. But that creates silos that are difficult for citizens to navigate. So he helped found 10x specifically with the purpose of leveraging GSA’s assets to create cross-government shared services with human centered designs in order to knock down those silos and streamline the customer experience.

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As the Quality Service Management Office (QSMO) for federal financial management continues to outline its long-term strategy, the Bureau of Fiscal Service isn’t forgetting about the last two decades of work.

The fits and starts and the successes and the failures to try to consolidate and standardize agency financial systems is weighing heavily on this governmentwide effort.

Matt Miller, the acting commissioner for the Bureau of Fiscal Service in the Treasury Department, said the four legacy federal shared service centers at the departments of Agriculture, Interior, Transportation and Treasury will continue to play a big role in this long-standing effort.

“Part of the underlying guidance and part of our charge as the QSMO is to engage with agencies broadly, as agencies need to be consumers in this marketplace. But in addition to that agency engagement, we have a separate work stream or track of engagement, specifically with those four legacy providers to try to determine what is their appetite to continue to provide those type or similar type services in the future in the marketplace, ensuring that the senior leadership of their parent organization support that. So we’ve had a lot of engagement with those providers trying to get clarity around that,” Miller said on Ask the CIO. “While all the agencies can be consumers of the marketplace, we would expect that even when these federal providers that want to offer their services in the marketplace, we still would be looking for their commitment that they ultimately would be also consumers in the marketplace. What I mean by that is, again, really to try to get to more standard, cloud-based modern financial systems, reduce the number of different systems that are out there with all the variations of configurations of systems at agencies.”

Miller said part of the discussion with the four legacy shared services providers is whether they too will modernize their technology offerings, and even become early adopters of the technology standards.

The challenge for these federal providers, of course, is the funding issue and whether or not they have the money to upgrade their technology infrastructure. Funding has been one of the biggest obstacles to broad adoption of shared services over the last 20 years.

“The successes [are] more prevalent when it comes to smaller agencies as opposed to the medium- to large-sized agencies, although Treasury Administrative Resource Center (ARC) provides services to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a cabinet level agency, and then most recently, Transportation’s Enterprise Service Center just migrated the Office of Personnel Management into their shared solution. So there’s been some level of success,” Miller said. “We’re trying to take the good from those and then learn where there’s opportunities. The underlying premise is standardization and reuse, where [we] can leverage things that are common, rather than creating and building customer unique. I think that one of the key areas of distinction in this approach moving forward, that we think will really be beneficial, is much more of a focus on the customer and the customer experience. That’s one of our guiding principles.”

Customer-centric, not provider-centric

The QSMO released a request for information in June laying out more specifics around how it plans to create a marketplace to standardize and modernize federal financial systems.

While the desire to move large agencies to these financial management shared service providers has struggled over the last almost two decades, the QSMO’s approach is trying to combine the public and private sector expertise.

Miller said the move toward a customer-centric marketplace from a provider centric one is among the biggest lessons Treasury learned over the last several years.

“What we’re looking at is a marketplace that will that will allow interaction with both commercial and federal, but still trying to allow that flexibility and choice but stamp that incorporating the standards into the solution,” he said. “With the prior marketplace, there were these four solutions, and if they met your needs great, but especially for larger agencies, if there were capabilities in the software or the related services that didn’t meet their needs, there wasn’t as much flexibility there to be responsive. With this marketplace, that is a combination of commercial and federal providers, it is much more of a customer-centric or a solution-centric marketplace that is what we are building.”

Miller said with 56 agency financial management systems coming toward the end of life by 2025, there is a going to be a significant need for the marketplace’s services.

Miller said the QSMO hopes to get the first set of services in place by the end of fiscal 2022 to begin serving some agencies like the departments of Commerce and Homeland Security, which have more immediate needs to modernize.

“We’ve been very intentional about the engagement with both industry and agencies. We think that critical input into building a marketplace, that industry is interested in support[ing] and that agencies are interested in see value in coming to consume the services,” he said. “The hope is that focus on the customer experience and in the collaboration with industry and agencies we really can move the needle on shared services beyond maybe where it’s been moved through past initiatives.”

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The Bureau of the Fiscal Service laid out its most complete vision to date of what the future of financial management shared services will mean to agencies and vendors alike.

The second request for information released in June outlined the role of the Quality Service Management Office (QSMO) and how they intend to reach the right level of standardization vs. flexibility.

Matt Miller, the acting commissioner for the Bureau of the Fiscal Service in the U.S. Department of the Treasury, said there is more “meat on the bone” around the core financial system baseline capabilities as well as potentially other types of offerings from the QSMO marketplace.

“We’re looking for the commercial providers to bring those modern, configurable service-oriented software solutions that will hopefully help the government and agencies reduce some duplicative technology footprint as well as maybe reduce some of the burden for agency CFOs and their folks to not have as much to do when it comes to maintaining software and technology,” Miller said in an interview with Federal News Network. “The underlying premise is standardization and reuse. Where can you leverage things that are common, rather than creating and building customer unique services? I think that one of the key areas of distinction in this approach moving forward, that we think will really be beneficial, is much more of a focus on the customer and the customer experience. That’s one of our guiding principles.”

It’s a guiding principle learned after more than 15 years of fits and starts to get agencies to move to financial management services.

Started during the administration of President George W. Bush, financial management shared services has been a goal now of three Office of Management and Budgets. There has been a few successes such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development moving to Treasury’s ARC. There have been plenty of failures too like the Veterans Affairs Department’s unsuccessful move to the Agriculture Department’s National Finance Center or the Labor Department’s disastrous attempt with a private sector provider.

Initial launch coming late 2022

Ann Ebberts, the CEO of the Association of Government Accountants (AGA), said these latest efforts by Treasury are steps in the right direction.

“Looking across the government over the years, there has been a number of initial tries at implementing new financial management systems. We’ve heard the stories that the efforts were taking too long or the product didn’t work like the way agencies wanted it to,” Ebberts said. “Treasury is identifying the capabilities needed and I think taking a more straight forward approach should go a long way to identify standard processes and data. Treasury is trying to get the customer involved and getting agreement on how the system or processes should work and what processes should be provided or supported. They are not creating this from whole cloth. Sometimes it’s just a matter of putting the right people together to describe the pros and cons.”

Miller said the two RFIs and the dozens of meetings with industry and agencies has been about getting the right people together, and influencing the QSMO’s planning to launch its initial marketplace offerings in late fiscal 2022. To be clear, the QSMO will be a broker or organizer of services. It will not provide any services.

“One of the key distinctions that we’ll see in this marketplace, as opposed to the most recent marketplace under the most recent initiative that spawned from OMB memo 13-08 a few years ago, is the result of OMB memo 13-08 created a federal only and a provider-centric marketplace. There were the four designated federal providers, and they all brought to market or brought to bear a standard solution. They were solid solutions, but there wasn’t as much flexibility and there wasn’t as much of an ability for the commercial providers to interact directly in the marketplace as well,” he said. “Now what we’re looking at is a marketplace that will allow interaction with both commercial and federal, but still trying to allow that flexibility and choice, but incorporating the standards into the solution.”

Miller said the previous shared services approaches were less customer-centric and more system centric.

“With this marketplace, we will have a combination of commercial and federal providers and much more of a customer-centric marketplace. We’re taking the good from the past in initiatives and shared services, and then building on it with some of the lessons learned,” he said.

The need to modernize agency financial systems isn’t new, but it took on a bigger imperative when the QSMO surveyed agencies last year to create a baseline understanding of the market.

Miller said the QSMO asked about the current system provider, whether the applications are hosted in the cloud or in data centers and other details that will help them shape the marketplace offerings.

“Even excluding the Defense Department, what we found out is that today, there are in place 56 separate installations of core financial systems, and half of those are going to be in need of either a major upgrade or some sort of acquisition or action to extend their life beyond 2025. So just four years away, half of the agencies are going to be facing some sort of modernization need. Also 60% of those systems are hosted on-premise today,” he said. “The results of that data call did a couple things. Number one, it helps us understand which agencies might have the more time sensitive needs and where we need to focus our partnership with agencies on to try to prioritize adoption in the marketplace. But also, it definitely underscored the importance of and the need and the value of this marketplace, well in advance of 2025. It really helped validate, and confirm the criticality of the need of establishing this marketplace as quickly as possible.”

The move to shared services is never fast, nor easy. That’s clear from what agencies have been through over the last 15-plus years.

Acquisition strategy in the works

But it’s also why Treasury isn’t going at this alone. Miller said they are partnering with the General Services Administration to create an acquisition strategy that will lead to the initial offerings next year.

“This is going to be a complex acquisition approach that we need to figure out. We need to be creative and innovative. In trying to work out what that acquisition approach is, we’ve got some end goals in mind. From an agency standpoint, we want this marketplace to be easy to access, easy to navigate and easy to consume the services that are needed from that marketplace. We need to think about that in the acquisition approach,” Miller said. “From an industry standpoint, we want to make sure that whatever approach we use to build this marketplace allows for competition, that it allows for innovation and that it allows for on-ramps and off-ramps over time for different providers. There’s a lot of careful thought and consideration into trying to nail down what’s the right acquisition approach, then executing that acquisition approach is going to take certainly many months to do so.”

Miller said the QSMO and GSA should have a better idea later this summer of the acquisition strategy and release it to the public.

AGA’s Ebberts said the other challenge the QSMO must face is with the workforce and the need for financial managers and others to understand how to manage shared services and work with the data that comes from these systems.

She said AGA’s Certified Government Financial Management program is addressing the need to upskill and reskill the workforce as the QSMO finalizes its approach.

Like many initiatives, the financial management QSMO is going to evolve.

Miller said the QSMO will continue to talk and listen to industry and agency customers as it develops its current strategy and future ones.

“We envision the marketplace will have both federal and commercial service providers. We envision that the marketplace will provide agencies with flexibility and choice, but the flexibility and choice will be of standards-based solutions. And the kind of the marquee aspect, or the centerpiece of this, is we envision the marketplace will be modern cloud based, service based core financial management software solutions,” he said.

And of course, he hopes if the QSMO builds it, the agency customers will come and forget about the past struggles.

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