News
Press Releases: Lines of Business
August 23, 2005
OPM Announces Agencies Selected to Be Shared Service Center Providers as Part of the HR Line of Business
Washington, DC - Today, the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced the five agencies that were selected to be the Shared Service Center providers under OPM’s Human Resources Line of Business (HR LOB). These agencies were selected on the ongoing condition that they meet all the requirements of the HR LOB.
“This is a significant step forward for the Human Resources Line of Business,” said Norm Enger, Director of the Human Resources Line of Business for OPM. “The selection of the Shared Service Center (SSC) providers will lead to better services and most innovative solutions with the lowest cost. These centers will provide business and technology solutions to support multiple agencies. The result will be an estimated savings of $1.1 billion over 10 years.”
The vision of the HR LOB is to create governmentwide, modern, cost effective, standardized, and interoperable Human Resource (HR) solutions providing common core functionality to support the strategic management of Human Capital. These common solutions will enable departments and agencies to work more effectively to meet the human capital goals of the President’s Management Agenda.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) initiated the move to the LOB phase of e-Government by establishing task forces for five LOBs in conjunction with the managing partners for each of the LOBs (OPM is the managing partner for the HR LOB). OPM then assembled an inter-agency HR LOB Task Force, which included representatives from twenty-two agencies, to identify a common solution, develop a target architecture, and draft a business case for the HRLOB. The result was a phased approach to delivering HR services through SSCs that will deliver a broad array of back-office services to multiple agencies. While the common solution envisions federal and commercial centers, the initial set of service centers are Federal agencies.
The selection process for these Federal agency SSCs had two phases. First, as part of the FY 2006 budget process, the Office of Management and Budget instructed agencies that wanted to be Shared Service Centers (SSCs) for the HR LOB to apply by submitting SSC business cases. Five agencies, the Departments of Agriculture (through its National Finance Center), Defense, Health and Human Services, Interior (through its National Business Center), and Treasury applied. OMB pre-screened these five prospective candidates from a budget perspective, and determined all five SSC candidates should be reviewed further through a SSC selection process, which was the second phase.
In the second phase, OPM conducted a rigorous qualification and selection process with the assistance of employees from the agencies participating in the HR LOB task force. OPM established two bodies: a Shared Service Center Technical Panel (SSCTP) and a Shared Service Center Advisory Board (SSCAB). The SSCTP was responsible for evaluating the technical merits of the candidate agencies (i.e. the strengths, weaknesses, and risks of each candidate SSC), and the SSCAB was responsible for evaluating the comparative strengths of the candidates and making a recommendation to the Selection Authority, the OPM Director. At the end of the process, Director Springer was pleased to select all five candidate agencies.
