News
Press Releases: Lines of Business
January 31, 2005
OPM Announces Human Resources Line of Business Shared Service Center Selection Process
Washington, DC - United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Kay Coles James today unveiled the process by which the first group of Shared Service Centers for the Human Resources Line of Business (HR LOB) will be selected.
On April 12, 2004, OPM established the inter-agency HR LOB task force which included representatives from twenty-two agencies. "When we convened the task force, its mission was to identify a common solution, develop a target architecture, and draft a business case, and I am happy to report that is exactly what it did," Enger said. "The task force continued the OPM e-Government record for delivering tangible, relevant results that make the work of HR departments throughout the government more efficient."
The common solution developed by the HR LOB task force takes a phased approach to delivering HR services through Shared Service Centers that will be processing centers delivering a broad array of back-office services to multiple agencies. While ultimately the common solution envisions federal and commercial centers, the initial set of service centers will be selected from among federal agencies.
The selection process has two phases. First, the Office of Management and Budget will conduct a validation process to ensure the candidate agencies are qualified from a budget standpoint. The results of that validation process will be announced as part of the submission of the President’s Budget.
Because these Shared Service Centers will be key components of the federal government’s human capital management structure, OPM will then take pre-qualified candidate agencies and conduct a rigorous qualification and selection process with the assistance of employees from the agencies participating in the HR LOB task force. OPM expects to conclude the process by May 2005.
At the end of the process, OPM’s director will announce the first group of Shared Service Centers. Enger said "our goal is to provide the federal HR community with sophisticated, progressive, fast-paced work environments that leverage economies of scale in delivering administrative functions, to dramatically reduce costs and streamline process and response time, and increase the quality and consistency of service provided."
