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Image: Rick Steele

'It’s business as usual for small agencies since these [shared-services] centers came on line. For large agencies, it’s a huge sea change." Anton Porter, FERC

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Tips for Moving to an SSP

Clearly identify requirements and stay on top of them—both internal business processes and external requirements imposed by GSA’s Financial Systems Integration Office.

Determine which software applications best align with your requirements.

Continue to work with the CFO Council’s transformation team, which voices the needs of agencies and is leading the migration effort.

Look for the value proposition for moving to a shared-services provider and demand that FM LOB leaders continue to clarify it.

Secure proper funding. Financial management migration is a multiyear effort that requires that funding be secured for its duration. Lack of consistent funding can cause interruptions, which will drive up the total cost.

Adopt best business practices already built into the federally certified commercial financial management system packages and don’t modify them during implementation. Vendor support is void if agencies materially modify the commercial software. Agencies need to control change management as part of the implementation to assure that this message is fully understood and followed.

Source: Education and Labor departments and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission

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EPA Picks Financial-Management Provider

The Environmental Protection Agency this month joined a short but growing list of large federal agencies moving to a shared-services provider for financial management.

Under the Office of Management and Budget’s FM Line of Business Consolidation initiative, agencies are to move to shared-services providers when appropriate. EPA made that decision last year and awarded CGI Federal Inc. of Fairfax, Va., an $84 million contract as the shared-services provider for its Financial System Modernization Project.

EPA’s 10-year award to CGI is the first for a large system procurement conducted by a CFO Act agency under the FM LOB. It also marks the first time an agency has conducted a full and open FM LOB competition across both public- and private-sector shared-services providers, holding them to the same standards in offer evaluation, said Donna Morea, CGI’s president of U.S. operations.

EPA will modernize its financial system to CGI’s Momentum software and migrate its financial-system IT hosting and application management to CGI as a commercial SSP under the FM LOB.

CGI provides hosting of its Momentum financial system for the General Services Administration, the Administrative Office for the U.S. Courts, and the Corporation for National and Community Services, CGI said.

Mary Mosquera

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Agencies Can Delay But They Can’t Hide

Some large agencies have tried to justify their resistance to moving to a shared-services provider by arguing that their needs are unique or their business processes are too complex.

“I think it’s near impossible for an agency to demonstrate uniqueness as a reason,” said Danny Harris, Education Department deputy chief financial officer and team leader of the Financial Systems Oversight Team for the CFO Council.

The issue about being too complex to be serviced by an outsider is not as good an argument as it once was, Harris said. The Environmental Protection Agency recently awarded its shared-services provider contract to CGI Federal Inc. of Fairfax, Va. “You can say you have an investment issue,” he said. That was the basis of his request not to move Education immediately to an SSP.

When the Office of Management and Budget started the Financial Management Line of Business Consolidation effort, Education was in the midst of a $20 million-plus upgrade of its Oracle system.

“To stop and migrate without ... a value proposition didn’t make sense,” he said. Education conducted a cost-benefit analysis, which demonstrated that giving up on the investment at that point didn’t make business sense.

OMB has since emphasized that agencies should migrate at the best time in the lifecycle of their financial systems.

Several other agencies, including the Health and Human Services Department, also have delayed migration because they were upgrading their financial systems when OMB issued FM LOB guidance.

“So long as those agencies continued to meet their implementation milestones, they did not need to consider migration until the next ‘appropriate time’ in the system lifecycle,” an OMB spokeswoman said.

The Labor Department procured its Oracle financial system shortly before the FM LOB guidance. Its contractor, Mythics Inc. of Virginia Beach, Va., a reseller, is not a shared-services provider, but Oracle is providing hosting through Mythics.

Labor has had to retrofit its plans and designs as OMB added earned-value management, shared-services providers and other requirements, said CFO Sam Mok. “Every time we add something, it has an impact,” he said.

Labor has managed the requirements well, but it is starting to add up. So Labor is looking at the cumulative effect of the adjustments and add-ons as part of its annual evaluation.

Mary Mosquera