A Busy 18 Months for OPM

The Office of Personnel Management noted a number of successes in reforming its IT programs since the start of a governmentwide effort 18 months ago.

In a blog post on CIO.gov on Tuesday, OPM Chief Information Officer Matthew Perry noted that the agency is celebrating the 18-month anniversary of the 25-Point Plan to Transform Federal IT Management with numerous accomplishments. Among these is the completion of five of eight TechStat reviews on the agency’s major IT investments, resulting in “clearer direction, stronger governance and cost avoidance for several of the major investments.”

The agency said it also has shifted to the cloud many of its services, including its public website; core financial, budget and procurement system; and facilities asset management. The USAJOBS website has shifted to a private cloud as well, and a system for submitting IT budget data to the Office of Management and Budget has migrated to a government cloud solution, OPM noted.

OPM also led the development of an IT program management job series, which fulfills point seven in the 25-point plan. In addition, Perry, as co-chair of the IT Workforce Committee on the CIO Council, helped champion the development of the Presidential Technology Fellows program to increase the federal government’s pool of qualified IT professionals.

The agency also has continued to help lead federal agencies’ migration to shared services, including the Human Resource Line of Business initiative managed by OPM. “As of May 23, 2012, 70.8 percent of federal agencies were migrating to, or were serviced by, a shared service center for human resource services, and 99.2 percent were serviced by a payroll provider,” OPM wrote.