The Trump administration wants to make a concerted effort toward establishing a sustainable shared services ecosystem to lower costs and ensure best practices and modern infrastructure pervade government—something past administrations have tried before.
Later today, Office of Management and Budget acting Director Russell Vought will be issuing a memo, “Centralized Mission Support Capabilities for the Federal Government,” which replaces all previous shared services policies. The new policy creates a system for assessing which agency functions—such as payroll or cybersecurity—have consistent standards across government and which specific departments would be best positioned to act as leaders in those areas.
The memo also includes a mandate for the rest of government to follow those agencies and puts a hiatus on new projects once functional areas are identified.
“In the past, agencies took steps to consolidate common mission-support functions internally, and in some cases, to leverage common technology or services offered by other agencies,” Vought wrote in the memo obtained by Nextgov. “The government endeavors to utilize lessons from previous successes and failures to provide a new, enhanced strategic blueprint for sharing quality services within the federal enterprise.”
Keep reading article at: https://www.nextgov.com/policy/2019/04/exclusive-what-ombs-new-shared-services-policy-will-mean-modernization/156562/
Joanie Newhart, associate administrator of acquisition workforce programs within OFPP, said at FedScoop’s 2019 IT Modernization Summit. She said that her office and the federal Chief Acquisition Officer Council are “focused on emerging technology and how can we use it in acquisition. We think it’s going to explode this year, so we want to get in front of it and use it wisely.”
If you are NASA and your SEWP contract is “best-in-class” does that mean the rest of your contracts are, say, “worst-in-class” or “meh-in-class?”
These numerous tasks, large and small, are essential to the federal government’s efforts in aligning with and working towards their missions. Federal agencies prioritize specific initiatives, allocating resources and talent to ensure their projects are successful and their goals are met. Much blood, sweat, tears and taxpayer money is put into these projects, and yet, one in three IT projects is canceled before it’s completed.
For the last year, the Suitability and Security Clearance Performance Accountability Council has been working on the Trusted Workforce 2.0 framework, the start of a wide-ranging effort to overhaul how background investigations are conducted. Representatives from the intelligence community, Defense Department, Office of Personnel Management, and Office of Management and Budget are leading PAC’s efforts.
