“This is a focused point of entry to selling and innovating with VA for our industry partners,” said Michael Parrish, VA’s chief acquisition officer, in a press release. “It fills a gap we’ve found in the acquisition lifecycle by creating the fusion of acquisition and innovation with this intelligent system.”

Parrish said last month that the new Pathfinder site will help vendors that haven’t worked with VA before getting certified through SAM.gov. But the site will also pre-filter to show only VA-specific solicitations.

“One of the great things about [the Pathfinder tool] is that it does provide a connection to that more innovative area,” said Charles Worthington, chief technology officer for VA’s Office of Information Technology. “So in cases where it’s a solution that the community thinks might help solve a problem that VA has, there is a path that it’ll lead you down, that can kind of flag you into that.”

Luwanda Jones, deputy chief information officer at VA, said during a VA Advanced Planning Brief to Industry on June 8 that the site will also facilitate vendor engagement scheduling. Eventually, she said, it will replace the VA’s IT Vendor Management Office scheduling email.

But Pathfinder isn’t the only way VA is trying to make it easier for vendors to work with them. Worthington said VA is trying to build a culture of transparency on the IT side, especially with vendors, in order to make it easier for them to integrate solutions. That’s evidenced in the new Lighthouse program, Worthington said.

Previously, he said, the team behind Lighthouse was primarily focused on vendors building third-party applications on top of VA services. For example, that might include a veteran linking their VA medical records to an approved health care app on their phone.

But now that team is turning its focus to internal interfaces as well.

“You’re going to be seeing more about this in the coming weeks and months. But what we’re really hoping to do is for all the different systems that run within our VA internal environment, we want to document the interfaces that those systems provide, and make it easy for teams to use those interfaces,” Worthington said. “We want to focus on making it easy for teams to leverage existing capabilities that are existing in other systems. And Lighthouse is a key way that’s going to help us do that. So more to come on this but keep your eyes open. And really, teams should be thinking about the core transactional capabilities of whatever system you’re working on. Exposing those to other systems in a standard way with an API is really the approach that has been most successful for integrating systems at VA, and we’re going to be leaning into that even more with our Lighthouse Developer Experience platform.”

Worthington also mentioned a VA design portal that’s intended to provide style and format guidance to contractors working with VA, in order to match the look and feel of the VA website. The idea is to ensure consistency across all communications involving the VA. Worthington said that can range from as simple as whether or not to capitalize the V in veterans, to technical minutiae like fonts, margins and color palettes.

Finally, Worthington discussed a shared service for notifications that VA is beginning to implement on its internal network. It will allow vendors to send personalized notifications to veterans via email or text. So, for example, they can let veterans know their application was received, or their prescription was updated. Worthington said the service is already integrated with VA’s veteran profile databases, as well as with its veterans preference engines. It also has a high level of trust with email providers, meaning it’s more likely to bypass spam filters.

This time, the renewed focus on federal shared services isn’t just about the technology.

The terms human-centered design and customer experience have crept into the ever-changing approach to providing agencies with back-office shared services.

Jeff Schramek, the deputy commissioner for fiscal accounting and shared services at the Bureau of Fiscal Service in the Treasury Department, said his goal to further evolve financial management, human resources, acquisition and travel shared services is a combination of maturing the services his organization provides and understanding the customers they serve in a more specific way.

“We have employees working for us that have the experience of working our systems, the efficiency and scalability of our programs, with the goal of being able to provide timely data and information to the agencies so they can do their work and make their decisions. So it’s really now becoming more about standardization,” Schramek said on Ask the CIO. “But we also want to know what our customer experiences through the whole process. We generally get 90% customer satisfaction in our services offerings each year, but customer service and actually customer experience are a little different. We want to make sure we’re bringing the agencies in early whenever we’re trying something new or bringing in a new system.”

Bringing in the customer early on

Understanding what the customer wants isn’t a new concept to shared services providers. In 2015, the General Services Administration launched the Unified Shared Services Management (USSM) office and added a playbook that emphasized the providers listen more to the voice of the customer.

The challenge, however, has been not just to listen to agency customers, but implementing real changes to the systems and offerings.

Schramek said the change the Fiscal Service is going through is to take a human-centered, agile design approach.

“We are bringing the customer in early to gauge what is it that they like about the system? What don’t they like about the system? What can we change?” he said. “We’re focusing our skilled employees who do business process reengineering and automation to focus on those [13 service] areas. Just recently, we did a review of the commercial accounts receivable organization, and what I like about what I heard through that process is this review was done and came up with about 10,000 labor hours of savings, and possibly over $100,000 of cost avoidance because sometimes you still use those people to do something else, but they can get off the manual processes. Also what I like about this business process servicing reengineering groups that we’re doing is they actually came back and told us where you can get your savings is using a bunch of different things. So it’s not just one tool. We are incorporating a robotic process automation bot into our reporting processes, that’s going to save 5,000 hours.”

Schramek said using RPA and other automation tools will reduce the burden on their customers and increase efficiency of the Fiscal Service’s services.

87 agency customers and growing

He said in one instance, automation will reduce the manual process of answering agency emails, of which the office gets more than 100,000 a year.

“That’s going to save over 3,500 hours if we implement that. We’ve got an automation tool in our accounting software that is kind of like a bot and that you incorporate it for reporting. That’s going to save about 1,400 hours a year,” Schramek said. “We have a lot of people who come in and start working for us, and we need to train them. Sometimes that requires a couple of weeks’ effort. There’s some training that you just need once a year so we’re building an automated video to replace some of that.”

Using automation and bots to improve financial services or human resources offerings is part of the Fiscal Service’s broader plan to improve customer experience.

And the Administrative Resource Center has plenty of customers that they hear from.

Schramek said ARC provides 87 agencies from small commissions and independent agencies to large cabinet level departments with, ranging from the departments of Treasury and Housing and Urban Development to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to the latest one coming on board this year, the Office of Personnel Management, a range of services from financial management to HR to acquisition to travel support services. He said about 50 agencies use their financial management shared services while 29 use some combination of the other offerings.

“We’re actually just finishing up a technology and data roadmap that we’ve created. What this really does is it looks at all four of our business lines, the systems in the software that we use in those four business lines, and where is the maturity level of those systems,” he said. “The good news for us from what we’re looking at is we don’t have too many that we have to really move off of and sunset. But there are a number, especially when they come out in the queue somehow that we’re going to need to make decisions: Do we stay on the version we’re on right now or do we do the investment to go and get the additional cloud based software services you can get on that? Those are the things we’re planning for.”

Data analytics on the horizon

Schramek added the roadmap also opens the door to bring more innovation into the shared services offerings. He said ARC will share their modernization and innovation plans with their customers whether it’s through the specific roadmap or through other ways is still to be determined.

Part of the roadmap is how ARC will bring more analytics to its customers. Schramek said currently his organization is providing data back to customers based on individual services whether financial management or HR.

Where ARC would like to go, he said, is for customer agencies to obtain data from all four business lines as they need it as well as provide analytics of that data.

“We can provide that information and provide them dashboards and some information back that then they can make decisions,” Schramek said. “I imagine some of our smaller commissions and agencies are probably going to use the dashboard and analytics we provide, whereas HUD and OPM would likely want to be able to get to the data and bring back to their analytics tools. But I think the data aspect is where we are going so we can give our customers timely data to the decision makers.”

Learning Objectives:

• Shared Services Provided by ARC
• Utilizing Automation in the Shared Services Realm
• Network Modernization
• Data Examination

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The federal shared services effort is about to undergo yet another revival.

The 20-plus year initiative to get agencies to move to common, back-office systems for financial management and human resources will, once again, try to convince agencies they have the cure to the legacy system disease.

“Many of the new solutions the government is or will be working on are digital products and services. This means that they are and must be designed with certain human best practices in mind. Those include human centered design, agile delivery, and frequent iteration in response to user feedback, which is critical to the work that we do,” said Krystal Brumfield, the associate administrator in the Office of Governmentwide Policy at the General Services Administration, at the recent ACT-IAC and Shared Services Leadership Coalition 2022 Shared Services Summit. “As we work on new shared services, we also want to continue to increase the adoption of existing and established shared services. If you have worked with federal services, and some of these might sound familiar, GSA fleet smart pay and the Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) vehicle. I’m happy to report that all 24 CFO act agencies have adopted GSA SmartPay. This is a big win for shared services. We will continue to work with the senior accountable points of contact at each CFO and agency to promote federalwide shared services. We will also actively reviewing other federalwide share services to see if they are willing and meet the criteria to be included in the existing shared services portfolio.”

Brumfield joined the long-list of federal officials offering the “this time will be different” speech about shared services.

A quick history: The Office of Management and Budget kicked off this idea of shared services in 2001, added the Lines of Business initiatives in 2004 and by 2019, added at least three more memos, a new strategy, which created the quality service management office (QSMO) approach. During every one of these instantiations, the level of frustration grew among users and the number of legacy systems continued to increase.

And despite all this hard work, time and effort, many agencies still need to modernize back-office systems — financial, human resources, grants and acquisition — to name a few. The Treasury Department found in 2021 that at least 56 federal financial systems are approaching the end of their useful life.

The number of human resources systems facing a similar fate is not yet known. The Office of Personnel Management is about to launch a survey of the state of HR systems to help direct their future strategy and marketplace.

Shared services challenges remain the same

With the exception of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Homeland Security Department, the QSMO effort suffers from the same maladies as previous attempts ranging from a lack of a clear mandate to no direct funding to oversight and accountability that ebbs and flows from OMB and from Capitol Hill.

Former and current federal officials who worked on shared services say while some mandates may be necessary, the key to this effort continues to be answering the “what’s in it for me?” question.

Jacqueline Jones, the deputy assistant secretary for administrative services at the Interior Department, said at the conference shared services providers, which the Interior Business Center is a governmentwide provider, must show agencies why moving their functions to another agency will be valuable.

“Are you going to take me to the next level for data analytics? How will you support my mission in a future state? How are you keeping up with everything that seems to change?” Jones said. “What I’ve experienced is it was always ‘that’s great, but it seems repetitive’ to what the agency is already doing. So we can’t just offer repetitive work. It must be mission focused work.”

Beyond the move to four e-payroll providers in the early 2000s that OMB mandated, there are only a handful of successful financial management or human resources shared services efforts. Even the latest attempt to modernize those payroll providers fell apart in November when one of the teams that the General Services Administration awarded a place on a multiple award contract dropped out.

The question then is, why is this latest revival different?

The answer, of course, is it may not be. Hopefully, the lessons of 20 years of fits and starts will drive the new efforts in the financial management and human resources areas to start.

Financial marketplace close to launch

The financial management QSMO led by the Bureau of Fiscal Service in Treasury is furthest ahead of the other non-cyber initiatives. The Fiscal Service just finished a two-year assessment to be ready for the future of financial management.

As part of that analysis, Commissioner of the Bureau of Fiscal Service Tim Gribben decided that they needed to run this QSMO marketplace as a business.

Tami Perriello, the deputy commissioner for finance and administration at BFS, said, the marketplace will be required to be competitive, control costs, focus on quality service delivery, be innovative and constantly looking at customer experience. She said the Administrative Resource Center (ARC), where the financial management shared service offering lives, now reports directly to Gribben.

Perriello said BFS will launch the FM QSMO marketplace with public and private sector providers later this year.

“We’re establishing and, very nearly there, partnering with our colleagues at GSA a more standards-driven marketplace that’s designed to meet common needs at a baseline of capability. We are collaborating with government and industry to establish those baselines and included in them all of the things that everyone could think of, which is going to be challenging for all of you providers of services and solutions to government,” she said. “The idea behind all of this is to reduce burden on agencies to adopt these shared services solutions. If it meets the basic standards, then the fewer, more unique requirements you have can be plugged in. But you can be confident that after we’re done reviewing it and it’s available on the marketplace, that service or solution is going to meet the basic governmentwide reporting needs and capabilities that all of us have to have to meet.”

GSA and BFS announced in April it would refresh the multiple award schedule with a new special item number for financial management quality service management office (FM QSMO) core financial management solutions and IT professional services.

GSA and the QSMO will hold a webinar on May 18 for vendors to learn about the technical evaluation requirements for SIN.

GSA and Fiscal Service are trying to make sure they answer the “what’s in it for me?” question too.

Brumfield added GSA is collaborating with agency and industry partners to create a performance management framework to measure the impact of the QSMO services.

“This framework will take a balanced scorecard approach to ensure that we’re able to measure how the marketplaces are performing,” she said. “The scorecard will roll out in three phases to validate what we’re doing, to make sure that there’s value in the work that we’re doing based on industry feedback. We will modify our business standards based to allow for public comment. These standards are placed on Regulations.gov.”

Brumfield said GSA also is looking for other shared services options from agencies. But, and going back to the value comment from Jones, Brumfield made it clear that “our lens should focus on what our customers want and their experience says from start to finish, this administration is committed to building an effective, equitable and accountable government that puts the public first.”

Technology a differentiator this time?

Perriello, a former CFO at the Small Business Administration, said the value question was one she often wrestled with in that role.

She said CFOs must be able to demonstrate to leadership that moving to shared services will make the agency mission more efficient and effective.

“One of the things that new technologies has brought to us is the ability to bring disparate systems together. New technologies allow not just a general ledger sitting there with dead transactions in it, but that bring that data in with all of the loan systems, the procurement system and the other systems that are providing transactions, and looking at all of the across all of those feeder systems and bringing that data together is now possible because of the advances in technology,” she said. “But not everybody can afford to do that, so making that available is incredibly important to meet both the unique needs of an agency and to achieve the benefits of standardization that a shared services can provide.”

It’s a positive sign that GSA and the Fiscal Service are talking about the needs of the customer and taking a human-centered design approach as they develop the marketplace. But what will matter in the short term is getting agencies to buy in to that concept and get some successes from a few early adopters.

And on top of that, the Office of Personnel Management’s decision to move its Trust Funds Federal Financial System (FFS) to the Treasury Department’s Administrative Resource Center (ARC) for financial management shared services may be further complicating matters and adding to the delays.

OPM told the Government Accountability Office that FFS, which supports more than 8 million active federal employees and retirees, will not cross the IT modernization finish line until October 2023, nearly six years after the initiative began.

“Despite the progress made on the modernization, OPM began experiencing schedule impacts and increased costs. Specifically, according to OPM’s risk register, these negative impacts were due to realizing several risks, including those related to gaps in knowledge and documentation of the legacy processes, system, and associated interface needs; and OCIO resource constraints,” GAO found in a new report released Feb. 23. “In particular, staff from [the] Office of the chief information officer did not have the requisite system knowledge or documentation to support a thorough understanding of the FFS legacy system or associated interface needs. In addition, according to representatives from OPM’s OCIO, staff most knowledgeable about the FFS legacy system were no longer with the TFM Program Management Office. Further, an ARC official stated that OPM lacked adequate documentation on the legacy systems.”

GAO said the steps OPM took to resolve these issues is a major reason for the delayed schedule and cost increases.

“For example, OPM tasked ARC to reverse engineer the system’s interface requirements, build an integration layer and develop test plans and scenarios to replicate OPM business cases, increasing the cost of the modernization by $4 million,” auditors said.

Vendors, software contributed to delays

GAO delays also came from the initial contractor, which GAO didn’t name, due to software issues, including gaps in skills and knowledge.

“Specifically, the program and the vendor used different versions of the same scheduling software, which corrupted the schedule files. As a result, the program had to recreate its schedule at least twice,” GAO said. “The official also stated that OPM’s new vendor addressed the software challenge by leveraging an older version of the scheduling software that was compatible with the agency’s version and now both vendor and agency are using the same software version. According to that official, the new vendor is also working to resolve the shortcomings indicated in our initial schedule assessment.”

The new vendor seems to be Deloitte. OPM awarded the consultant company a three-year, $7 million contract in late 2019 or early 2020 for Trust Funds Modernization products and services.

A third reason for the delay is attributed to OPM and ARC’s relationship. OPM entered into an agreement in 2019 to move FFS to ARC’s technology platform, standardize business processes and take advantage of software services for the operations and maintenance of the system, while OPM performs the transactional processing.

GAO found OPM didn’t have enough funding to meet the goals of its initial roadmap. In the report, ARC’s program manager told auditors that this delay was due to ARC needing to work around OPM’s resource constraints

OPM requested $8.8 million for the FFS program in 2022. If Congress approves full funding, GAO estimates OPM will have spent $71.9 million since 2017 on this project.

Shared service transition challenges

But it’s more than a funding issue. GAO said OPM and ARC’s systems potentially have trouble sharing data.

“In order to process health benefit credit accounts, OPM’s systems need to interface with Treasury’s Automated Standard Application for Payments. According to OPM, if the agency is unable to transition this functionality to Treasury’s system, it will delay the decommissioning of the legacy system and potentially increase the costs and extend the planned schedule of the program,” the report stated. “Although OPM initially identified this risk in July 2018, it increased the rating to high risk in May 2021. To mitigate this risk, OPM planned to conduct a high-level assessment of the gaps and incorporate the additional requirements for the solution into the next migration release schedule.”

Additionally, GAO said there are gaps between OPM’s business needs and ARC’s shared services.

“According to OPM’s risk register, if gaps exist between the agency’s business needs and ARC’s solution, the program may require additional time and resources to complete the modernization, while continuing to depend on legacy systems. OPM initially identified this risk in July 2018. To mitigate this risk, OPM completed a high-level gap analysis in January 2020 (during Engagement Phase 1) and planned to conduct conference room pilots during the migration phase,” the report stated. “According to ARC officials, the conference room pilots are intended to demonstrate custom development and standard system functionality, during the migration phase. In addition, OPM baselined all release 1 requirements during the engagement phases; but did not baseline release 2 requirements. However, it planned to complete the remaining requirements definition documents during the migration phase. Further, OPM noted possible custom configurations may be needed, which could result in increased costs.”

This isn’t the first time auditors called out the FFS for its struggles.

In 2018, the OPM inspector general found OPM transferred $500,000 earmarked for the FFS modernization to the Consolidated Business System modernization effort. Congress appropriated $21 million for OPM to pay for governance, environment modernization, and business modernization, which FFS falls under.

The IG says OPM senior leadership decided to strengthen “OPM’s legacy IT environment, not the improvement of business processes through new IT solutions.”

Modernization has never been easy

For much of the past two decades, OPM has struggled to modernize mission systems like FFS. Even after the 2015 cyber breach and with millions of additional dollars from Congress, the IG found in 2017 OPM fell short on its planning for how best to use the funding and before that in 2016 saying the agency’s capital planning process was lacking.

OPM’s new CIO Guy Cavallo is trying to address many of these long-standing IT modernization challenges by moving the agency’s network infrastructure to the cloud as much as possible.

Cavallo also led the effort for OPM to win $9.9 million from the Technology Modernization Fund to accelerate its move to a zero trust architecture.

GAO made five recommendations, including developing new cost estimates, conducting a risk assessment of its migration plans and review its interagency agreement with ARC to ensure it meets both parties’ needs.

OPM said it concurred with two and partially concurred with two others, but disagreed with the recommendation that it still needs to add more cybersecurity expertise to the project. OPM said it has done that already.

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Agencies and vendors using the contracts run by the General Services Administration should notice some improvements to their buying experience throughout fiscal 2022.

The Federal Acquisition Service is putting a larger focus on customer experience both on the front end systems and back end processes.

Crystal Philcox, the assistant commissioner of Enterprise Strategy Management in FAS, said the improvements coming are based on customer feedback.

Overall for both buyers and sellers, GSA wants to create more of a single entry point with single sign on both its customers to simplify their experiences.

“What we’ve heard are things like our contracting officers are generally responsive, but may be a little bit inconsistent in the information they request. We have heard from them that they’d like to see more standardization in what’s accepted by contracting officers and what they’re asking for,” Philcox said at a recent panel sponsored by AFFIRM, an excerpt of which played on Ask the CIO. “We have heard that once you try to get on our contracts that submission process, the timeline and the status is a little bit unknown. So really understanding how long that process will take and what all the steps are people are a little bit in the dark there. So we are doing some things to work on fixing that.”

Another area of focus is providing examples of completed templates to help contractors fill out forms or provide GSA with information.

“We’ve got a website here that you have to go to do that and a website here to go to do that, so having some sort of game plan or checklist around what the next steps are and having that all together in one place would be really helpful,” she said.

For buyers, Philcox said the goal is to improve the data around products and services.

“When there’s no pictures, there’s no descriptions, buyers frequently say that they have issues with some of the data and information that’s in the product catalog that they’re looking at. They say the search isn’t good, the inventory status or fulfillment information is not great, and they don’t like spending a lot of time putting orders together and then finding out later that it wasn’t in stock,” she said. “There’s a number of projects that are going on to address that. We’ve gotten a contract acquisition lifecycle management system that we’re working on right now. That is really going to fix that interaction with the suppliers, including things like being like help getting us the data and allowing us to share back, including where your solicitation is in progress.”

Philcox said many of these new tools will roll out over the next six months or so.

For example, GSA in January launched a new service under the GSA Advantage! portal that provides any details of stock disruptions from manufacturers and wholesalers reporting issues in the Verified Products Portal (VPP).

Services marketplace goals

On the back end systems, Philcox said her office is improving how data is organized and presented through a series of dashboards, which then can be shared with the broader acquisition community.

“The other thing that that data really allows us to do is to really think about our collaborative policymaking and our collaborative purchasing power to really work on some top level priorities right now, that includes strengthening cyber and its supply chain risk management. It includes promoting climate friendly purchasing. It includes promoting compliance with Made in America policies, and focusing on creating that diverse resilient supply chain,” she said. “We know that our supply chain has been shrinking over the last several years so we’d like to try to reverse that trend. We’d like more suppliers to be able to get into the marketplace and have that supply chain really strong.”

Improving the services marketplace is another priority with short and long term goals.

Tiffany Hixson, the assistant commissioner of the Office of Professional Services and Human Capital Categories, said her focus around service contracts is similar to what Philcox mentioned around improving back office systems and supporting industry.

“We’re working through having one training session so we can issue those delegations of procurement authority in a way that it’s a one time and you’re a trained acquisition professional. It’s really us telling you how to use these contract vehicles, how can we do that together,” she said. “We’re coming together to think through how to have one place that you can come in, ask those questions and get really feedback from experts on our staff in terms of how to use those contracts.”

In fact, Laura Stanton, the assistant commissioner of the Office of the IT Category, wrote in a blog post on Feb. 17 that GSA started standardizing the scope review process and created a digital tool/portal so customers can submit their scope review requests.

“This will allow for better tracking, management, and coordination across portfolios, as well as create a single customer experience. PSHC has already created a pilot single intake form and we are working to integrate that across other portfolios,” she wrote. “In the coming months, we’ll launch a single delegation of procurement authority training for OASIS and Human Capital and Training Solutions and a single on-demand ITC DPA, which combines 8(a) STARS III, VETS 2, and Alliant 2 to simplify the customer experience. We’ve also started the discovery phase for an order management tool for all services task orders. This will allow for better solicitation development, tracking, and task order management on GSA contracts.”

Stanton said these initiatives are examples of how ITC and PSHC are collaborating to improve buyer and seller experiences.

Updating the Calc tool

Another change coming that is focused on the agency buyer is around pricing.

Hixson said at the panel that her office is updating the Calc tool, which provides pricing intelligence.

“When that came out five years ago or so, it was really transformational in terms of providing that intelligence in a way that was searchable. Well, it’s time to refresh that work. We are working closely with Crystal’s team in thinking through how to refresh that particular dataset, how to bring in other pricing intelligence related services, that is searchable, and can help federal buyers as well as industry, benchmark their pricing in the services space,” she said.

Hixson said FAS currently has two different tools. One provides labor rates for a particular service, and the other is a price estimating tool that FAS has been testing out with the OASIS multiple award contract program.

“We’re really looking at how to align those. We will continue to start with improving labor pricing and pricing intelligence in that space. We’ve been using pricing intelligence that’s coming out of the multiple award schedule, ceiling rates that are awarded. But we’ve been collecting prices paid information on our governmentwide acquisition contracts and multiple award contracts for a number of years,” she said. “Also, the Bureau of Labor Statistics provides a whole bunch of data related to labor pricing that’s coming out of the commercial sector. So we’re looking at how do we really leverage all of those datasets to provide more pricing intelligence just in terms of labor costs that would then go into really this price estimating tool.”

Taking advantage of RPA

Philcox said part of improving the customer experience is reducing procurement lead time.

To do that, FAS is turning to robotics process automation (RPA) tools to accelerate some of the more mundane contracting paperwork.

Philcox said FAS is applying RPA to automatically fill out pre-negotiation letters for new contractors.

“We would send out a letter and our staff would normally have to dig into 6-7-8 different systems in order to look up information and pull all that into the letter. This RPA scans all of that, pulls all that information together for you so that you can very easily put together that renegotiation letter. It has saved us more than a couple of FTEs so far and we’ve just launched it,” she said. “We are continually looking for new areas to employ it. We are starting to look at machine learning too. We’re definitely using some natural language processing right now to dig out product information out of some of the data that we have. We are getting a lot more a lot smarter in how we think about data and about how to use it. We are investing in that area.”

Stanton added at the panel that every one of these efforts is about improving the process for GSA’s customers.

She said they are doing that by seeking to streamline how buyers and sellers interact with FAS across the board.

“One of the great examples that we did was commercial supplier agreements, which were taking just a significant amount of time on the terms of our staff, and we really applied a process improvement effort to be able to reduce the cycle time of those by 97%,” she said. “When we think about customer experience, we’re thinking not just about the direct contact with the customer, but we’re thinking of all of those back office processes that we’re talking about. We have an effort underway with our 2GIT to really look at how do we improve the speed of the modification process. That has tangible benefits to the customers if we’re able to do that because they’re able to access a larger product catalog that makes it easier for them to get their RFQs bids on. That’s something when we think about customer experience, I think often it haves that direct face-to-face contact, and we’re thinking about it in a much more expansive manner. We are really thinking about the life cycle of the holistic customer engagement and how they get what they need.”

But not every user possesses the same level of technological savvy, especially for agencies with public-facing systems that must provide access for all citizens. That requires building service models that take the full range of cybersecurity awareness and education into account.

For example, the Education Department deals with more than 6,500 higher education institutions and their students. Steven Hernandez, Education’s chief information security officer, said that can require various different kinds of authentication methods.

“When we do make those tradeoffs and decisions around when we have the tech-advanced and the tech-accessible user that has the cool authenticators, we probably need less concern about the association between the authentication and the identity,” he said during a Nov. 17 webinar. “At the other end, if we have a user who’s like ‘a username and password is what I can do,’ we may bring in some additional validation for identity. For example, what street did you live on 12 years ago? What car did you own in 1984? We’ll bring in some of those additional factors to figure out is this really the identity that we think we’re working with?”

Hernandez said this can also involve partnering with other agencies to share data that can be used in authentication. For example, Education already partners with IRS around financial data in order to streamline user experience in applying for financial aid, so repurposing that data for authentication is a natural fit. But Education also has data-sharing initiatives with other partners, like the Social Security Administration. Such data-sharing agreements can both improve citizen experience and strengthen security.

That can get kind of sticky from a legal perspective though, Hernandez said. Some citizen data requires legal authority to possess, so Education can’t necessarily go asking for data over which it doesn’t have the authority. On the other hand, he said, there’s a desire not to leave anything on the table that could help strengthen security. So there’s a tightrope to be walked, which Hernandez said results in discussions with other agencies about what is and isn’t possible, usually brokered and overseen by the chief privacy officer.

But Hernandez said these kinds of discussions help to lay the groundwork for what could become a shared services model for zero trust in the future.

“I think that we already have many of those pieces in place. The other piece is we have to maintain a citizens expectation of privacy, and frankly, independence. And we need to make sure that, as we build those systems that are more combined and federated, that citizens have the opportunity to choose their level of engagement and still get the services they need,” he said. “I think that zero trust provides us with a great path forward into how we can start to provide those types of services.”

He pointed to Login.gov as a potential first step along that road. It offers citizens the ability to choose whether they want a single login identity to access a variety of government services, or if they’d rather have separate logins for each one. That can determine what services citizens get access to, and how.

“But I think that we’re starting to go down the path and identity is the right place to start and authentication is the right place to start,” Hernandez said. “And we have that with Login.gov. I think as we go forward federalwide, we’re going to see greater adoption of shared services like Login.gov. And I think that’s going to move that conversation forward.”

Nico Papafil, director of the General Services Administration’s 10x program, said the program will fund more such ideas than ever before in fiscal 2022. 10x crowdsources ideas from federal employees and turns them into shared services.

“We’re just asking the question, ‘what problems [are you] trying to solve?’ And we actually added these investment themes to kind of create some guidelines that just show where we want to add weight for the types of ideas we want to select,” Papafil said during an Oct. 21 GovernmentCIO webinar. “And we talked about how do we help the public engage better with the government? That’s one of the themes. And we want to double down on last year’s themes about climate change, and how do we improve digital services around the climate space? And the last one is equity and delivery. How are we better, as a government, providing a more equitable service to underserved and underpopulated and underrepresented communities? And so those are the themes that we’re going to be looking at.”

Applicants have until Nov. 16 to submit ideas.

One such idea that Papafil said 10x is currently working on is called Benefits Eligibility Awareness Recognition Service (BEARS). The problem BEARS is intended to solve is that federal benefits services are siloed by agency, rather than following a human-centered design. BEARS would create one centralized resource that, without collecting personally identifiable information, would simply inform citizens what government benefits they are eligible for, and direct them to the relevant place to apply.

“So that’s a great example of a cross-agency type of tool,” Papafil said. “And I know some other folks are talking about their front doors for their agencies. And so we’re looking at it more holistically. It’s like a federal front door for certain components of what the public may need.”

It’s essentially the next step in the evolution of human centered design from what Barbara Morton, deputy chief veterans experience officer at the Department of Veterans Affairs, said the VA did back in 2018.

“That was the time, that summer of 2018, where we across VA and the Veterans Experience Office and other elements had begun to hear feedback from veterans saying, ‘Hey, it is really hard to figure out where the digital front door is at VA,’” Morton said. “And that’s sort of been a long standing pain point. But we were able to channel that, those pieces of feedback and really more deeply understand the challenge, which was there were dozens of different VA websites.”

So Morton said VA went to its customers and asked where they would start if they were looking to initiate a transaction with the VA. The answer the department got back was that VA.gov was the most common starting point.

That was the first time Morton said she was aware of a secretary-level agencywide decision made based on customer experience, but the human-centered design efforts at VA didn’t stop there. Once it was decided that VA.gov would be the agency’s digital front door, the agency realized it needed to overhaul the website itself.

“So if you had seen VA.gov a number of years ago, it would have looked very bureaucratic. And I say that with love in my heart, but it was designed from the inside out. It kind of looked like an org structure containing information that probably veterans and their families don’t really care about,” Morton said. “So we went back… in partnership with the chief technology officer and other siblings across VA, we redesigned it using human centered design. So when you see it today, you will see a much more user friendly website. Top transactions are up front, and we are codesigning and iterating all along the way with users.”

This exemplifies a point Papafil made, saying that agencies each have their own missions and customer base, and they’re all concerned with serving those customers. But that creates silos that are difficult for citizens to navigate. So he helped found 10x specifically with the purpose of leveraging GSA’s assets to create cross-government shared services with human centered designs in order to knock down those silos and streamline the customer experience.

As the Quality Service Management Office (QSMO) for federal financial management continues to outline its long-term strategy, the Bureau of Fiscal Service isn’t forgetting about the last two decades of work.

The fits and starts and the successes and the failures to try to consolidate and standardize agency financial systems is weighing heavily on this governmentwide effort.

Matt Miller, the acting commissioner for the Bureau of Fiscal Service in the Treasury Department, said the four legacy federal shared service centers at the departments of Agriculture, Interior, Transportation and Treasury will continue to play a big role in this long-standing effort.

“Part of the underlying guidance and part of our charge as the QSMO is to engage with agencies broadly, as agencies need to be consumers in this marketplace. But in addition to that agency engagement, we have a separate work stream or track of engagement, specifically with those four legacy providers to try to determine what is their appetite to continue to provide those type or similar type services in the future in the marketplace, ensuring that the senior leadership of their parent organization support that. So we’ve had a lot of engagement with those providers trying to get clarity around that,” Miller said on Ask the CIO. “While all the agencies can be consumers of the marketplace, we would expect that even when these federal providers that want to offer their services in the marketplace, we still would be looking for their commitment that they ultimately would be also consumers in the marketplace. What I mean by that is, again, really to try to get to more standard, cloud-based modern financial systems, reduce the number of different systems that are out there with all the variations of configurations of systems at agencies.”

Miller said part of the discussion with the four legacy shared services providers is whether they too will modernize their technology offerings, and even become early adopters of the technology standards.

The challenge for these federal providers, of course, is the funding issue and whether or not they have the money to upgrade their technology infrastructure. Funding has been one of the biggest obstacles to broad adoption of shared services over the last 20 years.

“The successes [are] more prevalent when it comes to smaller agencies as opposed to the medium- to large-sized agencies, although Treasury Administrative Resource Center (ARC) provides services to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a cabinet level agency, and then most recently, Transportation’s Enterprise Service Center just migrated the Office of Personnel Management into their shared solution. So there’s been some level of success,” Miller said. “We’re trying to take the good from those and then learn where there’s opportunities. The underlying premise is standardization and reuse, where [we] can leverage things that are common, rather than creating and building customer unique. I think that one of the key areas of distinction in this approach moving forward, that we think will really be beneficial, is much more of a focus on the customer and the customer experience. That’s one of our guiding principles.”

Customer-centric, not provider-centric

The QSMO released a request for information in June laying out more specifics around how it plans to create a marketplace to standardize and modernize federal financial systems.

While the desire to move large agencies to these financial management shared service providers has struggled over the last almost two decades, the QSMO’s approach is trying to combine the public and private sector expertise.

Miller said the move toward a customer-centric marketplace from a provider centric one is among the biggest lessons Treasury learned over the last several years.

“What we’re looking at is a marketplace that will that will allow interaction with both commercial and federal, but still trying to allow that flexibility and choice but stamp that incorporating the standards into the solution,” he said. “With the prior marketplace, there were these four solutions, and if they met your needs great, but especially for larger agencies, if there were capabilities in the software or the related services that didn’t meet their needs, there wasn’t as much flexibility there to be responsive. With this marketplace, that is a combination of commercial and federal providers, it is much more of a customer-centric or a solution-centric marketplace that is what we are building.”

Miller said with 56 agency financial management systems coming toward the end of life by 2025, there is a going to be a significant need for the marketplace’s services.

Miller said the QSMO hopes to get the first set of services in place by the end of fiscal 2022 to begin serving some agencies like the departments of Commerce and Homeland Security, which have more immediate needs to modernize.

“We’ve been very intentional about the engagement with both industry and agencies. We think that critical input into building a marketplace, that industry is interested in support[ing] and that agencies are interested in see value in coming to consume the services,” he said. “The hope is that focus on the customer experience and in the collaboration with industry and agencies we really can move the needle on shared services beyond maybe where it’s been moved through past initiatives.”

The Bureau of the Fiscal Service laid out its most complete vision to date of what the future of financial management shared services will mean to agencies and vendors alike.

The second request for information released in June outlined the role of the Quality Service Management Office (QSMO) and how they intend to reach the right level of standardization vs. flexibility.

Matt Miller, the acting commissioner for the Bureau of the Fiscal Service in the U.S. Department of the Treasury, said there is more “meat on the bone” around the core financial system baseline capabilities as well as potentially other types of offerings from the QSMO marketplace.

“We’re looking for the commercial providers to bring those modern, configurable service-oriented software solutions that will hopefully help the government and agencies reduce some duplicative technology footprint as well as maybe reduce some of the burden for agency CFOs and their folks to not have as much to do when it comes to maintaining software and technology,” Miller said in an interview with Federal News Network. “The underlying premise is standardization and reuse. Where can you leverage things that are common, rather than creating and building customer unique services? I think that one of the key areas of distinction in this approach moving forward, that we think will really be beneficial, is much more of a focus on the customer and the customer experience. That’s one of our guiding principles.”

It’s a guiding principle learned after more than 15 years of fits and starts to get agencies to move to financial management services.

Started during the administration of President George W. Bush, financial management shared services has been a goal now of three Office of Management and Budgets. There has been a few successes such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development moving to Treasury’s ARC. There have been plenty of failures too like the Veterans Affairs Department’s unsuccessful move to the Agriculture Department’s National Finance Center or the Labor Department’s disastrous attempt with a private sector provider.

Initial launch coming late 2022

Ann Ebberts, the CEO of the Association of Government Accountants (AGA), said these latest efforts by Treasury are steps in the right direction.

“Looking across the government over the years, there has been a number of initial tries at implementing new financial management systems. We’ve heard the stories that the efforts were taking too long or the product didn’t work like the way agencies wanted it to,” Ebberts said. “Treasury is identifying the capabilities needed and I think taking a more straight forward approach should go a long way to identify standard processes and data. Treasury is trying to get the customer involved and getting agreement on how the system or processes should work and what processes should be provided or supported. They are not creating this from whole cloth. Sometimes it’s just a matter of putting the right people together to describe the pros and cons.”

Miller said the two RFIs and the dozens of meetings with industry and agencies has been about getting the right people together, and influencing the QSMO’s planning to launch its initial marketplace offerings in late fiscal 2022. To be clear, the QSMO will be a broker or organizer of services. It will not provide any services.

“One of the key distinctions that we’ll see in this marketplace, as opposed to the most recent marketplace under the most recent initiative that spawned from OMB memo 13-08 a few years ago, is the result of OMB memo 13-08 created a federal only and a provider-centric marketplace. There were the four designated federal providers, and they all brought to market or brought to bear a standard solution. They were solid solutions, but there wasn’t as much flexibility and there wasn’t as much of an ability for the commercial providers to interact directly in the marketplace as well,” he said. “Now what we’re looking at is a marketplace that will allow interaction with both commercial and federal, but still trying to allow that flexibility and choice, but incorporating the standards into the solution.”

Miller said the previous shared services approaches were less customer-centric and more system centric.

“With this marketplace, we will have a combination of commercial and federal providers and much more of a customer-centric marketplace. We’re taking the good from the past in initiatives and shared services, and then building on it with some of the lessons learned,” he said.

The need to modernize agency financial systems isn’t new, but it took on a bigger imperative when the QSMO surveyed agencies last year to create a baseline understanding of the market.

Miller said the QSMO asked about the current system provider, whether the applications are hosted in the cloud or in data centers and other details that will help them shape the marketplace offerings.

“Even excluding the Defense Department, what we found out is that today, there are in place 56 separate installations of core financial systems, and half of those are going to be in need of either a major upgrade or some sort of acquisition or action to extend their life beyond 2025. So just four years away, half of the agencies are going to be facing some sort of modernization need. Also 60% of those systems are hosted on-premise today,” he said. “The results of that data call did a couple things. Number one, it helps us understand which agencies might have the more time sensitive needs and where we need to focus our partnership with agencies on to try to prioritize adoption in the marketplace. But also, it definitely underscored the importance of and the need and the value of this marketplace, well in advance of 2025. It really helped validate, and confirm the criticality of the need of establishing this marketplace as quickly as possible.”

The move to shared services is never fast, nor easy. That’s clear from what agencies have been through over the last 15-plus years.

Acquisition strategy in the works

But it’s also why Treasury isn’t going at this alone. Miller said they are partnering with the General Services Administration to create an acquisition strategy that will lead to the initial offerings next year.

“This is going to be a complex acquisition approach that we need to figure out. We need to be creative and innovative. In trying to work out what that acquisition approach is, we’ve got some end goals in mind. From an agency standpoint, we want this marketplace to be easy to access, easy to navigate and easy to consume the services that are needed from that marketplace. We need to think about that in the acquisition approach,” Miller said. “From an industry standpoint, we want to make sure that whatever approach we use to build this marketplace allows for competition, that it allows for innovation and that it allows for on-ramps and off-ramps over time for different providers. There’s a lot of careful thought and consideration into trying to nail down what’s the right acquisition approach, then executing that acquisition approach is going to take certainly many months to do so.”

Miller said the QSMO and GSA should have a better idea later this summer of the acquisition strategy and release it to the public.

AGA’s Ebberts said the other challenge the QSMO must face is with the workforce and the need for financial managers and others to understand how to manage shared services and work with the data that comes from these systems.

She said AGA’s Certified Government Financial Management program is addressing the need to upskill and reskill the workforce as the QSMO finalizes its approach.

Like many initiatives, the financial management QSMO is going to evolve.

Miller said the QSMO will continue to talk and listen to industry and agency customers as it develops its current strategy and future ones.

“We envision the marketplace will have both federal and commercial service providers. We envision that the marketplace will provide agencies with flexibility and choice, but the flexibility and choice will be of standards-based solutions. And the kind of the marquee aspect, or the centerpiece of this, is we envision the marketplace will be modern cloud based, service based core financial management software solutions,” he said.

And of course, he hopes if the QSMO builds it, the agency customers will come and forget about the past struggles.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is rolling out mobile security products for agencies to take advantage of through its shared services marketplace.

CISA’s Cybersecurity Quality Services Management Office (QSMO) is piloting three capabilities for mobile device security. The initiative is aimed at improving the security of government-furnished devices like smartphones and tablets.

Vincent Sritapan, section chief for CISA’s cyber QSMO office, told Federal News Network about the pilots in an exclusive interview. He said mobile has always been “a part of our DNA” with existing initiatives like the protective Domain Name System firewall and its covering of endpoint devices.

But the latest offerings include a protective DNS capability specific to mobile traffic, as well as shared services for both mobile application vetting and device security.

Sritapan said the services, while in various stages of development, are already funded and available for free as a central service.

“Do we fund this in perpetuity and Congress approves appropriations for us to do so? Or is it a fee-for-service model? I think those are still to be determined,” he said on Federal Monthly Insights — Disrupting the Kill Chain. “But as of right now, there is no cost.”

The mobile application vetting, or MAV, service aims to assess the security of government-developed mobile applications.

“There’s always been those concerns of, what are the standards that people are following? Are they securing their mobile apps?” Sritapan said. “There’s a huge dependency there, but in truth, there’s no real requirement. So this capability, this offering is something we’ve seen the community ask for and need, but not necessarily be able to afford. What we look to do in this case is pilot more of a centralized capability, having this available for government-developed mobile apps to ensure the security, privacy, policy, all the above.”

CISA awarded Kryptowire a phase III Small Business Innovation Research Contract to develop the MAV service pilot capability, according to the agency. The pilot will launch in fiscal year 2022 and involve up to three civilian branch agencies as early adopters.

“We’ve already had some early discussions with early adopters,” Sritapan said on Federal Drive with Tom Temin. “And notably, DHS and others definitely using that in their entire enterprise is our intent. This is a ‘crawl, walk, run’ mentality, trying this out with early adopters, it’s cloud-based, looking to get an agency [Authority to Operate] as a part of our process, but it’s very much a capability that’s sorely needed. And hopefully the first step in this direction.”

Meanwhile, the QSMO will also be offering the Traveler-Verified Information Protection service as a way to secure devices themselves. The T-VIP’s developer is Pacific Northwest Laboratory, and Sritapan said it’s already being used to various degrees by nearly 40 agencies today. He said the tool is for government use only.

“Do we use a commercial tool, which maybe in this case the adversary may have access to and maybe is able to reverse engineer, versus, should we keep this close hold,” Sritapan said referring to the decision to use a government-developed capability. “It has certain functionality and capabilities that law enforcement, the IC, DoD, other [federal executive civilian branch] agencies really want and need.”

T-VIP identifies suspicious changes on Apple and Android operating systems used by personnel traveling overseas.

“This tool is not a forensic tool,” Sritapan said. “If you think about lowering the burden, when someone goes and they travel, they come back — do I need to wipe their device or I need to do forensics on their device? Do we need to think about how many that come back and the staff you have back home? This is really taking that haystack, and you’re looking for a needle in the haystack, and making the haystack smaller.”

While agencies are using T-VIP individually today, Sritapan said the government is rolling out a “3.0 in beta” desktop application early in FY-22 to make using it easier and more flexible for agencies. He said CISA also wants to make it available to state, local, tribal and territorial governments as well.

The cyber QSMO is also working to integrate a new protective DNS service for mobile devices into its existing protective DNS shared service for enterprise environments. Sritapan said CISA and the Department of Homeland Security’s science and technology directorate are working on two research and development efforts looking at the technologies.

“Traditionally, you’re going to see your desktop and your server type of applications,” Sritapan said. “But as we look at mobile devices, Android, iOS, smartphones and tablets, you want to look at, how is that going to work? Does it integrate easily into your enterprise mobility management solutions or unified endpoint management solutions?”

He said vendor solutions for mobile protective DNS are currently in the test and evaluation phase.

For all of the pilots, Sritapan said the traditional metrics of success apply, including both the rate of usage and customer service. But he said CISA will also learn important lessons about how individual agencies are approaching mobile security.

“We’re not prying into any agency’s data, but it’s really about understanding and improving the security posture for federal civilian executive branch agencies, especially in the mobile arena, mobile devices and applications that they would use,” he said. “All this is aimed at protecting federal networks, and mobile devices and applications are really just a gateway in.”

The General Services Administration and Department of Homeland Security are offering two different, but equally important initiatives that either will prove that the federal community cares about past performance as a key evaluation factor or has been playing lip service to the issue since 2009.

Over the past 11 years, successive memos from the Office of Federal Procurement Policy encouraging agencies to do more research and evaluation of contractor performance on contracts have had little impact.

“We think there is a clear appetite for Contractor Performance Assessment  Reporting System (CPARS), but contracting officers and industry also know the current CPARS process is broken. I think OFPP hears it from contracting officers that it’s burdensome, and they hear from contractors that it’s not resulting in fair and accurate ratings,” said Mike Smith, a former DHS director of strategic sourcing and now executive vice president at GovConRx, which has been leading the effort to revamp CPARS for much of the past two years or more. “Agencies can use CPARS data to strategically manage procurements, but there needs to be wholesale relook at it. We need to make sure it results in good information and the information is more strategic and tactically used.”

DHS and GSA will see firsthand this year if that appetite is strong enough to address the systemic problem of CPARS — too many contracting officers are saying a vendor’s performance is satisfactory for two main reasons: A lack of time to explain why the contractor was outstanding or exceptional, and to avoid any lengthy back-and-forth if a rating is below average or poor.

AI pilot in phase 2

DHS is trying to address these shortcomings by applying artificial intelligence tools to the CPARS process.

Its program is in the middle of phase 2 where five companies are building a production-ready software tool. DHS awarded these companies — IBM, CORMAC, TrueTandem, Strongbridge and Hangar — $125,000 to demonstrate their technologies this year.

“The user community will take a look during these demos to make sure they feel like they are trustworthy solutions. We want the value to be proved out,” said Polly Hall, director of DHS’ Procurement Innovation Lab (PIL). “The demos are focusing on harder issues. They built these to be commercial solutions and using software-as-a-service (SaaS). We don’t want the federal government to buy the AI and own it. We want to buy licenses and for the tools to ingest the information and present it to us in [a] way that is useful.”

DHS and nine agency partners: The departments of Commerce, Energy, Interior, Veterans Affairs, and Health and Human Services, as well as GSA, NASA, the Air Force and the U.S. Agency for International Development — are reviewing the pilot. The agencies gave the five companies 50,000 procurement records, which they anonymized, to help train the AI.

Hall said by July DHS and its partners will decide which of the technologies should move into phase 3 and will get the software tools an authority to operate in time to launch January.

“If we can solve some of the challenges with policy and security accreditation, we will move into phase 3 where the agency partners will test the technologies on actual solicitations. They still will do a human review, but also bring in the AI solution and compare them on real procurements to validate and compare,” she said. “The final phase would be to move into full production, and maybe create a governmentwide contact so agencies can choose which tool they want to use.”

Hall said offering the AI tools as a shared service is another possibility. She said the more agencies that use the tools, the lower the cost will be and the more value it will provide all agencies.

She said the contracting officers who have tested out the AI tools have found them valuable.

“We are cautiously optimistic and we believe everyone will see the value. This is the year where our hard work comes to bear and we either get it or not,” she said. “We need our partners and OFPP to step up and work with us to make this happen. We feel good that there has been a lot of discussions with agency CIOs and at the governmentwide level about getting through the challenges of the ATO and about addressing the hard policy issues.”

New memo promoting self-assessments

For GSA, it’s a matter of whether contracting officers pick up on the ability for vendors to provide self-assessments on specific projects.

GSA senior procurement executive Jeff Koses issued a memo in February promoting the use of vendor self-assessments as one step in the overall CPARS process.

This is something Smith and GovConRx have been promoting for the past few years.

Jim Williams, a former federal executive with GSA, the IRS and the Department of Homeland Security — now a principal with Williams Consulting LLC and an advisor for GovConRx — said contractors feel they aren’t being judged fairly and have no input into the process. He said the GSA memo is a permission slip for contracting officers to start asking for a self-assessment as part of the broader CPARS process.

“We believe this will give CPARS more balance because of the input by contractors, and it will alleviate [the] burden on contracting officers. It will produce a more accurate and fair rating,” he said.

Williams and Smith said the self-assessment would be just one piece to the puzzle, but would open the door to a wider conversation, similar to an employee doing a self-assessment for their boss. Smith said this self-assessment approach is common in the human resources sector, and no reason the same approach can’t be used by the acquisition workforce.

“Contractor self-assessments can save time while allowing contractors the opportunity to make their case about their performance. Getting the contractor’s point of view early on in the process may reduce the back and forth during the 60-day period contractors have to respond to a CPARS notification following the assessing official’s evaluation in the system,” Koses wrote in the memo. “A contractor actively tracking its performance may have fewer performance issues. If nothing else, editing someone else’s work is much easier and faster than creating an evaluation from scratch.”

OFPP needs to get more involved

GSA recommended contracting officers use the contract kickoff meeting after award to have initial discussions about self-assessments so the contracting officers can track performance during the full life of the program and correct any issues on an ongoing basis.

“The memo is a good first step for GSA. We would like to see OFPP issue something on a more governmentwide basis that encourages the use of contractor self-assessments,” Smith said. “You wouldn’t believe how many contracting officers refuse to take input from industry because they think they aren’t allowed to. As a contacting officer, I’d rather have a back and forth at least by midyear, if not before, so we can adjust course and have a common understanding at the end of the performance period and there are no surprises about ratings and the basis of that rating.”

Williams added that good contractors will jump at the opportunity to do a self-assessment because they will finally be able to have input into the process.

“We think this will help small businesses particularly because when contracting officers see they have done larger jobs and done them well through relevancy search and high CPARS, then they are more likely to feel comfortable with awarding them a contract,” he said. “It also will help contracting officers because they will make better decisions through data, use it as a tool to have discussions that can also be used at the task order level.”

If both initiatives turn out to be successful over the next year, it’s time for OFPP to not just issue another memo but mandate its use and actively promote its use through the frontline forum, at industry events and on Capitol Hill. And they shouldn’t wait until there is a confirmed OFPP administrator.

You might not think a $23 billion annual budget will have you looking for ways to pinch pennies, but if you’re NASA, the cost to explore the universe can be out of this world.

Pinar Moore, deputy project manager at NASA, said watching how they spend their money is part of NASA’s culture.

So some 15 years ago, NASA planted its flag into shared services to consolidate and offer centralized services for the space agency’s 11 centers around the country and beyond.

“Everybody was doing their own human resources, travel processing and financial management,” said Moore on Federal Monthly Insights – Digital Modernization: Automation month.

The shared services effort is headquartered at Mississippi’s Stennis Space Center.

“Basically it provides services such as human resources, procurement, financial management training, an enterprise service desk, a customer contact center, and digital imaging, to name a few,” Moore said on Federal Drive with Tom Temin. “I have no doubt that the incoming administration will also see the value of being competitive with private industry and getting the right people in for cybersecurity jobs.”

There is a major IT infrastructure that supports those services.

“The infrastructure includes pretty much everything,” Moore said. “We have three major contracts fulfilling the majority of the requirements in terms of delivery of the networks, and delivery of the hardware and software on all the application requirements across the networks, and storage solutions, etc. These are all handled throughout the agency, but we collaborate in today’s world. So we have people all over the USA.”

The philosophy of being tight-fisted, but also reaching beyond the technological cutting edge, has NASA always looking for the best options.

“We are looking at new tools, new services offered across the agency, such as smart anything, WiFi anywhere, laptops versus desktops, Bluetooth video capabilities, apps for our phones, small mobile devices, faster network capabilities, storage solutions, and the list goes on and on,” Moore said.

Moore said NASA is continuously looking to improve, by consulting their customers, relationship managers, and subject matter experts.

“We investigate all the network and infrastructure problems, hardware, software and IT services incident data to see what is working and what’s not working for us,” Moore said.

And one other key ingredient to staying at the top of their technological game, is asking questions.

“Why do we need to modernize? What types of problems are we trying to resolve? How will this change deliver value to our customers? What are their expectations? Do they have the right skills to adapt? Will it require a culture change? How is our current architecture? Can it be simplified? Can we make it more secure, robust, flexible or accessible? Are there any opportunities to consolidate same and similar services? What are our unique capabilities? How will modernization enhance these capabilities? Are there better and cheaper alternatives to currently what we have? Will the changes create unmanageable risks? How do we migrate? What are the critical steps? How do we realign resources to meet the demand and for transformation?”

But the most important question according to Moore is, “Can we deliver quickly?”

The Federal Acquisition Service at the General Services Administration brought in record revenue last year for IT products and services.

Customer agencies flocked to the schedules program, the assisted acquisition services and the governmentwide acquisition contracts (GWAC) to meet both immediate needs related to the pandemic and more typical requirements.

Laura Stanton, the assistant commissioner for the Office of Information Technology Category in FAS, said while numbers are not final yet, the IT category brought in more than $30 billion in revenue last year, up from $26.5 billion in fiscal 2019.

“That really represents the trust that the federal agencies have put in us, the customer service, the support in reducing the acquisition lead time, the innovation, the data transparency, all of the things that the federal agencies have put their trust into ITC in order to make that happen,” Stanton said during a recent panel sponsored by ACT-IAC, which was featured on Ask the CIO. “Out of that, we also provided more than $2 billion in savings and cost avoidance to the customers out of ITC alone. Those are getting into some pretty big numbers. Also, we’re seeing these numbers increasing on the business volume, just to give you an idea of the scope.”

She added that the cost savings and/or avoidance numbers are reviewed on a program-by-program basis.

“We are looking at it really not using the same approach across the board, but really looking at what’s appropriate for the program. What’s the methodology that we use? How do we look at that?” Stanton said. “We do it because we know that agencies are coming to GSA to leverage category management principles and the buying power of the government. Being able to look at the power that that brings is an important aspect of understanding sort of the contribution that we’re making to the American public, the contribution we’re making to the agencies helps us understand where we’re doing well, and where we potentially have a chance to improve.”

There may be no better example of that spending and savings/cost avoidance than the Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) contract.

Allen Hill, the acting deputy assistant commissioner for category management also in FAS, said agencies have awarded about $14 billion in task orders through EIS by the end of calendar year 2020.

“We have some staggering numbers and cost savings avoidance that far exceed our initial estimate. An example last reported from DoD, it’s average cost avoidance savings is around 45%. That’s a lot,” he said. “In addition, you’ve heard the Department of Health and Human Services’ estimate that they’re going to save about $700 million over the life of the task order. EIS doing exactly what it was intended to do, saving taxpayer dollars and facilitating IT modernization across the federal government.”

EIS deadline approaching

With agencies facing a March 31 deadline to move at least 50% of their network inventory to an EIS contract, Hill said he expects the numbers to only increase.

Additionally with Congress adding EIS transition to the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) scorecard, it will continue to be in the spotlight for the next two years.

“It does not change our process. They’re actually right now looking at the same data that we look at in terms of disconnects from the legacy contracts. And so that’s how they’re measuring it,” Hill said referring to the scorecard grades.

Of course, EIS is just one of several multiple award contracts GSA is running.

Stanton said GSA also continued to promote emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics process automation (RPA), and will offer new acquisition vehicles in 2021 under the small business GWAC called Polaris and ASTRO.

“We also launched the IT acquisition university, which is about the digitization of the workforce, and how that’s beginning to change how we get out new information on how to buy and about technology,” she said. “We are identifying use cases and making sure that the solutions we’re putting together can meet the agency’s use cases. What we are looking at is what are the use cases that we’re seeing on TIC 3.0, or what are the use cases that we’re seeing in other areas of technology. Then, we are making sure that EIS can meet those use cases, then it simplifies life for industry. It simplifies how the agencies can acquire those technologies. This is something that we’re looking at for AI and how do we use that more broadly across the entire portfolio to understand agency’s technology needs and make sure that we’re meeting them.”

TIC 3.0 uses cases in the works

For EIS, this means adding new capabilities like software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) and Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) 3.0 use cases. Hill said GSA will add TIC 3.0 requirements and technologies at the master contract level.

“It allow agencies to acquire solutions that are more conducive to how federal agencies work today as the dispersed workforce. As you know, at the start of the pandemic agencies were in a scramble mode, trying to address their infrastructure needs. They bought, for example, virtual private network (VPN) licenses and expanded their bandwidth,” he said. “With the TIC 3.0 guidance and using EIS, agency will be able to adopt a more scalable, elastic, TIC 3.0 compliant solutions.”

Hill said the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and GSA are working on other TIC 3.0 use cases, including for a zero trust architecture.

“The surge in government telework is dictating a fresh look at how network security is architected. For vendors, they can help agency understand their specific capabilities and compliance by creating overlays for each of the use cases and how their solutions meet those three old guidelines,” he said.

Hill said he expects 2021 and beyond to continue to move agencies toward the “as-a-service” model and buying services in a more holistic way versus the traditional way they purchased IT more piecemeal.

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House and Senate lawmakers in the fiscal 2021 spending bills are coming down hard on the governmentwide shared services effort to modernize payroll services.

Senate Appropriations Committee members would cut all funding for the NewPay initiative.

At same time, lawmakers from both houses of Congress are supporting the Labor Department’s internal shared services efforts. Legislators would give them more than $25 million in 2021 to further consolidate technology services through its working capital fund.

Maylin Jue, Labor’s enterprisewide shared services program manager, said money in the working capital fund is key for the agency to make more progress in 2021 and beyond under its back-office centralization and consolidation initiative.

“Next year we are rolling in all shared services into the working capital fund. This past year, we went with interagency agreements because that was the easiest thing in terms of lifting and shifting organizations from one place to another,” Jue said in an interview with Federal News Network. “With working capital funds, you can bring in all the money from the agencies and then you have one pot of money you are dealing with. It’s also no-year money so if there are savings from one year, you can apply them to the next year.”

The Senate Appropriations Committee, which released all of its spending bills on Nov. 10, wrote in the Labor bill that it would allocate $27.6 million for IT modernization efforts. In that is $4.9 million for support systems, and the rest is for infrastructure modernization efforts.

“The committee continues to request that the department submit a report to the Committees on Appropriations of the House of Representatives and the Senate not later than 90 days after enactment that provides an update on projects to be funded, planned activities and associated timelines, expected benefits and planned expenditures,” the bill states. “The report should also include completed activities, remaining activities and associated timelines, actual and remaining expenditures, explanation of any cost overruns and delays and corrective actions, as necessary, to keep the project on track and within budget.”

The House version, which passed in July, would give Labor $25.3 million for IT modernization.

“Information Technology (IT) Modernization provides a dedicated source of funding for departmentwide IT modernization projects together with funding through the department’s Working Capital Fund,” the House wrote.

Jue said some Labor components were submitting money into the working capital if they had been using the shared services for things like procurement or human resources. But if the component just started using the assorted services in 2020, then her office established interagency agreements to transfer funding.

“We have stood up a new centralized office of human resources. We transitioned all HR staff from across the department into one new office. This allows us to have more team building, training and customer outreach, and it allows us to optimize business processes,” Jue said. “We have seen improvement in the consistency of the services and making sure everyone is following the same policies across the department. We’ve gotten a lot of compliments from a lot of the agency about improvements in staffing, which is a huge win for the department to hire more effectively and efficiently.”

Senate and House cut NewPay funding

While the HR consolidation is furthest along, Labor’s end goal is to reduce costs and improve efficiencies and consistency across all administrative functions.

This is a similar goal of the governmentwide initiatives, such as NewPay.

But lawmakers have bigger concerns about the initiative led by the General Services Administration. GSA asked for $20 million in 2021.

“While GSA has been pre-designated by the Office of Management and Budget to serve as the quality service management office for civilian human resource management services, the committee understands that current GSA capacity is totally inadequate to help federal agencies move to more modern and cost efficient technologies for common mission support services such as payroll and other human resources services,” Senate lawmakers wrote. “As currently structured, the committee is also concerned that NewPay only addresses a very small percentage of the actual federal payroll services currently provided to federal employees by shared services providers. In addition, the committee is concerned about the lack of transparency and details thus far on any return on investment analysis regarding NewPay’s implementation cost impacts to current agency customers as well as the migration costs that federal agencies and departments might incur to transition current payroll and related systems to NewPay or other more modern systems.”

To address these challenges, the committee would want GSA to work with the largest federal civilian payroll and human resource management shared services provider for program management and implementation efforts associated with NewPay and related shared services initiatives.

“Given the lengthy process and timelines of GSA’s NewPay and Unified Shared Services Management initiatives, to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of current common mission shared services, and to avoid duplication of these efforts across other federal agencies and departments, the committee directs GSA to allow its shared services providers to actively market their current payroll, financial or other human resource management services to other federal agencies and departments,” the Senate committee wrote. “The committee recommendation does not include funding for GSA’s Working Capital Fund for migration and other costs associated with NewPay due to continued concerns regarding implementation costs and potential impact to current federal agency personnel and customers.”

Driven by Louisiana delegation?

The House version of the Financial Services and General Government spending bill doesn’t come down quite as hard, but still withholds funding and wants more transparency from GSA.

“GSA has also yet to provide detailed justifications, spend plans and obligations by category, activities, or services already funded with the $20,600,000 provided in fiscal 2019 for NewPay implementation by the Technology Modernization Fund,” the House committee wrote. “The committee understands that GSA has established a NewPay Project Management Office within its own organization. However, the committee wants to avoid establishing duplicative agency offices and expertise, and to ensure that millions of federal employees’ payroll and human resources services are not interrupted or adversely impacted during transition to NewPay’s limited services. The committee directs GSA to consult with the existing federal civilian payroll and human resource management shared services providers for the program management and implementation efforts associated with NewPay and related shared services initiatives, and to produce a report on those consultations with 180 days of enactment of this act.”

Concerns outlined by lawmakers are less present for agencies trying to consolidate internally first.

Now, as one source said, many of these Congressional concerns may be coming from members who represent Louisiana, where the Agriculture Department’s National Finance Center is located and provides hundreds of jobs to the community.

At the same time, however, agency-focused consolidation and centralization efforts rarely come up as hot button issues.

Labor’s Jue said the end goal of Labor’s efforts is the improved delivery of HR, IT, procurement and personnel security service

“Service will be more consistent across the department, as it will all fall under one service provider that utilizes standard policies and procedures,” she said. “Service will be compliant with federal regulations and will strive to meet industry best practices in both the public and private sectors. Creating centralized offices for administrative services will also allow more opportunities for innovation within the department. By improving IT functionality, providing more user friendly HR services, improving procurement efficiency and streamlining personnel security processing, DOL employees will be able to focus more on their mission rather than being burdened by administrative tasks.”

Jue said Labor saw the benefits of the consolidation efforts during the pandemic. She said employees switched over to telework without a problem because policies and processes were in place.

“My background is around performance management budget and process improvement so that is what we will be focusing on,” Jue said. “We will make sure we have the right metrics in place, and putting in place new metrics as needed. Then, we really are trying to optimize services by improving the processes, which over time that should lead us to cost savings.”

An update on each of the projects:

NewPay

In response to the President’s Management Agenda and Cross-Agency Priority Goal on Shared Services, the General Services Administration (GSA) launched NewPay to modernize federal payroll services and ensure that employees’ payroll experience is consistent government-wide. Through NewPay, the government is deploying, for the first time, a standards-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that all agencies can utilize to deliver payroll in a timely, reliable manner to the federal government’s 2.2 million civilian employees. In 2018, GSA awarded a NewPay blanket purchase agreement to configure commercial, off-the-shelf-based, SaaS solutions capable of managing time reporting and payroll across the government’s 300-plus different pay plans.

Application modernization

In 2018, GSA-IT Launched the application modernization project as an initiative to jump-start transformation and migration of agency systems from proprietary to open source technologies. The transformation simplified integrations with other systems; enabled greater agility, resiliency, scalability and performance, reducing the risks and lowering the cost of operations.

Additionally, GSA-IT created a playbook and has successfully used the process for other, non-Technology Modernization Fund-supported development and modernization projects.

What has GSA used the money from the TMF Board for?

NewPay

GSA’s NewPay Program utilized TMF funding to support a number of initiatives related to the technical design and development of the SaaS solution. In 2018, GSA awarded a NewPay BPA to configure COTS-based SaaS solutions capable of managing time reporting and payroll across the government’s diverse portfolio of pay plans and in 2019, GSA awarded task orders to support the development of a technical minimum viable product (MVP) for payroll only. Links to both award announcements are below:

• BPA announcement
• Task Order announcement

Application modernization

GSA-IT used the TMF funds and leveraged existing contracts to modernize 11 applications and create the playbook. Three of the efforts completed during the first pilot phase in 2019, and the remaining eight are in process to complete before the end of fiscal 21.

How much faster has the TMF loan enabled GSA to move?

NewPay utilized the TMF award to provide foundational support to design and configure the technical MVP for payroll calculation and allowed work to start and progress in an immediate fashion.

Application modernization

This work and effort would not have been possible without these additional funds.  Specifically the playbook that has been key for other efforts.

Has GSA paid back any portion of the loans?

Yes, the GSA NewPay Team made its first payment of $500,000. The GSA NewPay Team has an annual schedule of payments through fiscal 2024.

Application modernization

GSAIT’s first payment of approximately $4 million is in progress. GSA-IT has been able to meet the initial commitments with only the first two tranches of TMF funds. Therefore, GSA-IT will not be taking the third installment of the award.

How is GSA determining how much money it’s saving?

NewPay

The GSA/NewPay team anticipates cost savings/avoidance will be realized upon completion of the payroll and time and attendance technical functionality and full customer migration to such solutions. In learning from the development process, the GSA/NewPay team is identifying other key variables and cost factors which could drive cost avoidance and opportunities to be more efficient in payroll management and operations.

Application modernization

GSA-IT is tracking the technology license footprint and future labor cost avoidance, but will not know the exact amounts until negotiations and contracts are updated in the next few years.

How is GSA sharing its lessons learned?

Application modernization

Through playbooks published at Tech.GSA.gov as well as briefing the Federal CTO Innovation Council.

What advice would GSA give to other agencies?

General Response

The TMF Board is a high-caliber group of technology executives from across the federal community, and they are thought to have stated that they are primarily interested in investing in projects that have some kind of govternmentwide applicability, so the agency could advise those who follow in their footsteps to highlight and focus on describing the broader implications of the specific project at hand.

Based on the way the TMF payback rules are structured currently, it is very important that an agency have a good grasp on how it is going to pay back the TMF funds, i.e. known customers, reliable revenue stream, etc.

NewPay

Make sure organizations consider customer impacts and constraints, complexity, and risk when designing their payback model.

Application modernization

Make sure the payback model is approved at the highest levels before accepting the TMF loan.