OMB calls for shared services migration by December

The Office of Management and Budget is calling on agencies to complete by Dec. 31 a migration to two information technology shared service initiatives in a strategic plan it released May 2.

The plan (.pdf) is part of the Shared First initiative Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel announced late last year. The December deadline is an expected one, since it was first mentioned in a draft plan OMB put out in December 2011.

As an intermediate step, the final plan calls for agencies to submit by Aug. 31 a plan to consolidate commodity IT. OMB says agencies can implement Shared First at first with commodity IT at the intra-agency level through use of an agencywide enterprise architecture to identify areas of duplication, as well as the PortfolioStat process OMB has unveiled. Agencies were already required by OMB to submit to it by March 1 two areas for likely migration to a shared service, whether at an intra- or inter- agency level, by the end of this year.

Agency providers of shared services must also submitted by Aug. 31 a plan to improve quality and the number of customers, the strategy says.

As a mechanism for agencies to find shared services OMB says it and the Federal CIO Council will launch later this fiscal year (which ends Sept. 31) an online catalog of IT services available for shared use. Included in that will be contract vehicles--and in fact, new participation in a governmentwide or agencywide contract vehicle is an acceptable instance of migration to a shared service under the strategic plan.

For more:
- download the final OMB shared services strategy (.pdf)

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