New White House guidance charts future of shared services

The Office of Management and Budget pushed out guidance May 4 meant to strengthen the federal government's shared services apparatus.

The memo takes aim at administrative shared services, calling for greater standardization and a focus on fewer systems overall across government.

The guidance also institutionalizes work that has already been underway.

OMB plans to designate a Shared Services Policy Officer to help lead government-wide shared services policy and implementation.

The guidance gives the General Services Administration's Office of Unified Shared Services Management  120 days to develop an administrative shared services concept of operations. USSM is also charged with creating an investment review process to promote shared services.

The process will assess any "significant" – definition to come – agency investments in financial management, human resources or acquisition systems that might be duplicative or in other ways conflict with a cross-government shared services agenda.

Crafting a government-wide shared solutions acquisition strategy, publishing an implementation playbook and managing a new ProviderStat review process are among USSM's other new directives.

"Realizing the promise of shared services is a long-term effort," wrote OMB Controller Dave Mader and GSA Administrator Denise Turner Roth in a joint blog post on the guidance. "[It is] one that challenges government leaders to adopt a new lens for decision-making that at times may require prioritizing the federal enterprise over the individual agency."