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The General Services Administration awarded contracts to three systems integrators at the end of December that will support agencies' human resources IT management initiatives. Private companies will bid for work against five federal agencies also offering governmentwide HR shared services.

In March 2004, the Office of Management and Budget initiated a governmentwide analysis of five lines of business supporting the President's Management Agenda goal to expand electronic government. The Human Resources Line of Business requires agencies to use governmentwide technological solutions for basic HR functions to cut costs and improve efficiency and customer support.

"OMB does not want to duplicate HR systems already in place," said Joe Jeu, assistant commissioner of GSA's Federal Acquisition Service Office of General Supplies and Services. "All agencies are moving into shared service platform, and there will not be additional funds to upgrade current systems."

According to a May 2007 memorandum released by OMB, agencies are no longer allowed to spend money to develop, modernize or enhance internal HR management systems. Rather, OMB asked agencies to outsource the maintenance and operations of the HR systems to a public or private sector shared service center. Under OPM and OMB's consultation, the agency awarded multiple schedule contracts on Dec. 21 to Accenture National Security Services and Carahsoft Technology Corp., both based in Reston, Va., and Allied Technology Group in Rockville, Md., which will act as public shared service centers. In 2005, OMB and the Office of Personnel Management authorized the Agriculture, Defense, Health and Human Services, Interior, and Treasury departments to act as public shared service centers.

The agencies and companies will offer agencies the required core services that are transactional, such as payroll, personnel and benefits action management, time and leave, and bonus and monetary awards, as well as nonmandatory core services, such as employee management and labor relations.

GSA will continue to accept proposals for contracts from companies that will be reviewed on an annual basis. The number of contracts awarded is not known, Jeu said, nor is the potential value and duration of the contracts, which will be listed as special item numbers for Schedule 738 under the Multiple Award Schedules Program.

"Unlike other schedules, vendors were required to go through operational capability demonstration tests [where they] performed live transactions, and evaluation teams were brought in from other agencies as well as GSA," Jeu said. "Those that passed the tests were then put through other technical and functional reviews. The process was very rigorous."

COMMENTS

• Why is there never input from the users and people who will be affected--instead of the automatic assumption that Shared Service Centers will be better and cheaper? Since EPA has converted to the Defense shared service center, I have lost both money--from the excessively long delays now in processing changes--and leave from the inaccuracies in the new system. That kind of system certainly doesn't encourage young, new employees to want to come to or stay with the govt. No one considers the fact that everyone now having to be typists, file clerks, and jacks-of-all trades merely because something is on a computer doesn't save money when you have a lot of high-level, poor typists taking ten times as long to do what they aren't familiar with as used to be done by entry-level clerk-typists who were familiar with the systems and entries. Now, most of us have little time to do our jobs for all the data entry in all the systems that are presumed to save us time and money because they are on a computer--but actually waste more. Shared service centers don't consider that for many advanced functions in the govt. it takes a certain number of people to carry out the necessary tasks, whether they are in one place or ten, and making them one-size-fits-all usually creates more inefficiencies trying to get around the things that don't fit in the system for each agency's unique needs. That doesn't even count the fact that I have learned from nearly thrity years of contracting that it always costs more to have a private contractor do the same job at the same level as govt. employees--who still have to oversee and usually correct or "direct" what the contractor does. A concerned govt. employee Posted January 23, 2008 12:20 PM
• How can the federal SSCs provide the expanded services that customer agencies demand when the SSCs Departmental management manages the purse strings? Why did OMB/OPM change the longstanding rules about the 3 core HRLOB services and allow the private sector vendors to respond with solutions that did not include payroll? How can the private SSCs truly compete when they are not equal to the federal SSCs who all provide payroll services as well? Why didn't GSA reveal that additional vendors beyond the initial 3 will be added in the very near future? Why is DoD being allowed to replace of their front-end HR systems outside of the HRLOB framework? How can the federal government truly move forward in a unified fashion when agencies like EPA, Labor and VA are allowed to make multiple switches between HR and payroll providers, burning up scarce resources and bumping small agencies out of the queue? MP Posted January 3, 2008 3:02 PM
• I previously worked with DOD and we had (first) the PERSACT system and later the MODERM System. Both of these were better than what I am now working with. The MODERN System, while somewhat cumbersome at first, proved to be a very workable start to finish electronic processing system. The speed at which I could process an action from cradle to grave was exceptional..... we really need to look at some of these in used and proven systems before spending a large amount of money on a system that doesn't greatly improve on what is already available. Donald L. DeNike Posted January 3, 2008 11:45 AM