Agencies setting up lines-of-business management structure

Even though the president’s fiscal 2006 budget is far from complete, agencies leading the lines-of-business e-government initiatives are moving forward as if the projects are a done deal.The financial management and human resources projects in 2005 will establish governance committees for the projects to steer the initiatives in specific directions.The Office of Management and Budget is reviewing the business cases, which do not become official until they are released as part of the federal budget in February.Samuel Mok, co-chairman of the consolidation project for financial management and chief financial officer at the Labor Department, yesterday said the project team will submit its management plan to OMB for approval in the next few months. “The governance structure is needed to guide the evolution of standards, assist in establishing the centers of excellence and migration [schedule] of agencies to a common solution,” Mok said at a panel discussion on the lines-of-business projects sponsored by the Industry Advisory Council in Falls Church, Va. “Our business case calls for the first agencies to use the centers of excellence by 2007. This requires the initial set of agencies and centers of excellence to have initial standards to work with by 2006.”The human resources initiative this winter will move the management of the project to an executive steering committee from a task force, said Norm Enger, chairman of the task force and director of e-government programs at the Office of Personnel Management. “The committee will work to define the common solution at the shared service centers and work with the architecture group,” Enger said. “We will name our first shared service center in 2005 and migrate our first agency in 2006.”Enger also said the architecture working group is developing a profile that matches the Federal Enterprise Architecture.“We started with 10 major subfunctions and broke them down by their numerous activities,” Enger said. “We have found more subfunctions since then and have started to address the business functions, which is how they do the work.”The architecture, which should be finished by the end of December, eventually will be distilled into the requirements for a request for proposals, Enger said.