OMB expands technology consolidation effort

The Office of Management and Budget is pressing forward with its effort to consolidate and centralize federal information technology systems, despite admitting that not all the details are resolved.

OMB last week kicked off three governmentwide task forces to review additional areas -- called "lines of business" -- it has deemed potentially ripe for consolidation.

The areas that will be examined are: IT infrastructure, geospatial systems, and systems for budget formulation and execution. Previous line of business task forces formed by OMB have recommended that agencies shut down individual IT systems and instead buy services from a handful of government agencies appointed as service providers, or from the private sector.

Agencies already have been asked to eventually shut down their financial management, human resources and grants management systems in favor of centralized service providers. Governmentwide migration to financial management service providers should be complete by 2015. The combined savings of consolidating financial management and human resources systems will amount to $5 billion over 10 years, OMB officials have said.

OMB has estimated that a similar approach with IT infrastructure could save the government between $18 billion and $29 billion over a decade. Government officials have said task force analysis might not result in a call for agencies' budget formulation and execution systems to be consolidated. Instead, the analysis could focus on promulgating governmentwide standards.

In a time of tight budgets, consolidation efforts will free up funds that agencies can spend on mission-related systems, rather than back-office functions, OMB said. Within industry, outsourcing the back office is a common practice.

But translating private sector principles into the federal government on a such wide scale is not a simple process. How the government will mitigate the additional risk created by mandatory client-provider relationships between agencies has not yet been resolved, said Karen Evans, OMB administrator for e-government and IT.

"There's a lot of questions out there that we still need to answer," she said last week, while testifying at a hearing called by the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Government Management, Finance and Accountability.

Similar efforts, such as the e-Travel e-government initiative, have assumed that agencies volunteering to become service providers would meet expectations. But that hasn't always been the case. "A few of the service providers did not do what they said they were going to do," Evans said.