OMB establishes draft metrics for financial services

The Office of Management and Budget released an exposure draft of 10 metrics to assess financial services across government as part of the Financial Management Line of Business. The metrics are meant to identify areas to improve the performance and affordability of financial services that shared-services providers and agencies supply.OMB established the in collaboration with the Financial Systems Integration Office and the financial-management community. The measures support provisions in the migration planning from OMB and FSIO in September to help agencies determine how to move to the Financial Management Line of Business.Agencies will assess the Phase I metrics, including system availability, call closure rate and restoration time for hosting-caused outages, initially for March and report that data by May 1. Agencies must report data for subsequent months within 30 days of the end of the reporting period. Phase 1 will build a baseline of performance and lessons for subsequent phases.Agencies will report performance data through a single system that FSIO manages. The data will be available as appropriate to OMB, the Chief Financial Officers Council, shared-services providers, agencies and possibly the public.As this effort progresses, reports will provide performance trends, distinguish top performers from poor performers, and identify areas for improvement and for corrective actions as needed.“By making shared-services providers and agency performance more transparent, establishing accountability for improved results and increasing competition among shared-services providers, both shared-services providers and federal agencies will be encouraged to continually improve both the performance and affordability of the financial services they provide,” OMB said in the draft.For shared-services providers, the metrics support more informed judgments about the performance and affordability of the services they provide. For agencies, the metrics help agencies make decisions about the performance and cost of the financial services they provide in-house, how they compare with other agencies and which service provider best meets their needs.OMB will update the performance measures for IT infrastructure hosting and administration and application management services in the second phase. It will add a limited set of metrics for systems implementation and business process areas, along with lessons learned from the initial phase of assessments.Agencies and shared-services providers can comment until Jan. 19.