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GCN Home > February 18, 2002 issue

Follow the Money

By Dipka bhambhani, GCN Staff

Agencies upgrade to financial management systems for the Web

Five years after the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act, most agencies still run separate, or stovepiped, financial systems. But the General Services Administration, Office of Personnel Management and State Department are no longer among them.

State and OPM are installing the Momentum federal financial management system from American Management Systems Inc. of Fairfax, Va. GSA has finished its installation of that system.

Stovepiped systems do not meet the financial management standards set by three oversight bodies: the General Accounting Office, Office of Management and Budget, and Treasury Department.

OPM wanted to comply with all three sets of requirements, not just one or two, said Maurice Duckett, senior adviser to the chief financial officer. Duckett said he looked for an off-the-shelf product that he wouldn’t have to customize.

Alan Evans, managing director of State’s Bureau of Financial Management Services, had a slightly different requirement. He wanted something that could work with existing systems at U.S. embassies and agencies abroad.

Backward compatibility

“The primary focus is to replace some ancient and obsolete systems,” Evans said.

But Thomas Cowley, director for personnel systems at the General Services Administration, said too much customization can be costly and inefficient. Agencies might as well develop the software themselves if they’re going to put much of their own staff time into it, he said, adding that at least some customization is essential.

“It’s a balancing act,” he said. “We have to report to OPM.” GSA just finished replacing its nearly 30-year-old legacy financial management system with Momentum. “The idea was to have a full-fledged relational database,” Cowley said.

OPM implemented Phase 1 of its Government Financial Information System in October without customization. The agency extracted data from its Financial Accounting and Management Information System (FAMIS), developed by KPMG Consulting LLC of McLean, Va., and loaded the data into the new Momentum system for the Web.

The most difficult thing about the transfer was code conversion, Duckett said. “We had to translate the codes that made FAMIS run into Momentum codes so we could load the data,” he said.

KPMG did not want AMS to work on its proprietary coding, so OPM managers had to do the conversion themselves.