Federal Shared Services Implementation Guide April 16, 2013

Post date: Aug 4, 2016 8:37:27 AM

Executive Summary In May 2012, OMB released the Federal IT Shared Services Strategy to provide agencies with guidance for identifying and operating shared services for commodity, support, and mission IT functions.1

That strategy recommended a phased approach for implementing shared services, (e.g., “crawl-walk-run”) beginning with intra-agency commodity IT to allow agencies to gain proficiency, and then evolving to support and mission IT areas. “Shared-First” is a transformational Government business model aimed at rooting out waste and duplication across the Federal IT portfolio which encompasses a number of initiatives: CIO authorities, procurement reform, PortfolioStat, and IT shared services strategy.

It is a compelling approach for Federal agencies today that are facing growing mission requirements in an environment of declining resources. Shared-First drives organizations to provide service delivery of equal or higher quality at equal or lower costs. Identifying and pursuing opportunities for shared services is one method to reduce operating costs by leveraging shared platforms and service delivery. This Federal Shared Services Implementation Guide provides information and guidance on the provisioning and consumption of shared services in the U.S. Federal Government.

The guide provides agencies with a high level process and key considerations for defining, establishing, and implementing interagency shared services to help achieve organizational goals, improve performance, increase return on investment, and promote innovation. It includes specific steps that should be considered for identifying shared services candidates, making the business case, examining potential funding models, using agency agreements, and discusses some of the key challenges that should be expected along the way. In addition, the guide addresses shared services roles and responsibilities; the creation, governance, funding and implementation of shared services through associated lines of business (LOBs); and the use of the new, online,

Federal Shared Services Catalog – Uncle Sam’s List. The successful implementation of shared services between agencies depends, first and foremost, on executive level initiative and buy-in, followed by program-level implementation. Without agency executive commitment, identifying agency areas that make the most sense for migration to shared services, and facilitating those migrations, along with the organizational changes that accompany them, will be prohibitively difficult. There are currently significant opportunities to implement IT shared services government-wide.

This is likely to produce significant cost savings or cost avoidance and yield improvements in agency operations. The new fiscal reality being faced by the Federal Government is continuing to push agencies to innovate with less – a prospect that is much easier to achieve by leveraging shared government services. Consequently, when a Shared-First approach is implemented in concert with PortfolioStat reviews, standardized architecture methods, and digital government planning concepts, agencies will have a stronger set of tools by which to innovate with less. 1 Federal Information Technology Shared Services Strategy,

Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Office of EGovernment and Information Technology, May 2, 2012, http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/egov_docs/shared_services_strategy.pdf.