The White House’s new approach to shared services remains on track for full implementation during fiscal year 2020, according to an update to the Sharing Quality Services cross-agency priority (CAP) Goal on the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) released September 19.
To recap, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released Memo 19-16 in May to centralize shared services in certain fields under agencies designated as Quality Service Management Offices (QSMOs). QSMO agencies will have approval power over the purchases for other civilian agencies in their field of expertise, and will create a suite of offerings.
The biggest step that potential QSMO agencies took in Q3 was completing and submitting their five-year plans for review. Three of the four areas in the process to become QSMO agencies completed their plans and submitted them to the General Services Administration (GSA) and the Shared Services Governance Board (SSGB) for review. The exception is grants management, which pushed its plan back to April 2020 due to the need for a grants readiness assessment.
The Q3 update has much in common with the Q2 update on the implementation – GSA and the SSGB will make recommendations in Q1 of fiscal year 2020, and OMB will make the final designation decision within the next fiscal year. Data standards are causing some delays in the financial management QSMO applicants at Treasury completing the Federal Integrated Business Framework that agencies need to complete, and the cybersecurity QSMO at the Department of Homeland Security is still unsure of when they will complete the framework, but most implementation timelines seem to be holding steady.
One area where the update did find delay was on the Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) contract. The PMA set the goal of enhancing cybersecurity by having agencies use EIS, but the update cites the delays in vendors receiving authorities to operate and the need for the TIC 3.0 policy to be finalized as factors in the delay.