It might not surprise you to learn that the federal government isn’t always the most efficient entity when it comes to services procurement. This doesn’t have to be the case though, and shared services is a great place for agencies to realize efficiencies.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration created QSMOs (Quality Service Management Offices) to manage modernization and procurement efforts in specific areas of practice. The first four QSMOs concerned human resources, financial management, grants management, and cybersecurity. These offices leverage the institutional knowledge of the agency that’s managing them. For example, the Health and Human Services Department will standardize grants given that it’s already far and away the largest grant offeror and already engages in grant-related shared services activity.
Throughout the year, these offices have been working on standard setting, but three of the four are now ready to begin their implementation phase. Despite their experience, finding consensus in standard setting for the grant management group at Health and Human Services has taken longer than anticipated.
The first deployment under the QSMO program is the GSA’s NewPay project. NewPay is an effort to modernize payroll and scheduling in government, reducing the amount of disparate software being used, and bringing down costs by 75 percent. While implementation is beginning, progress is expected to be slow.
Especially in the early going, it’s important to pay close attention to what does and doesn’t work, so positive results seen from QSMOs can be repeatable. It’s one thing to successfully deploy a new payroll system, but it’s a much larger task to use an implementation like this as a roadmap for other shared services projects going forward.
Just because the QSMOs are managing shared services doesn’t mean that their solutions have to be one size fits all, which makes for a more daunting task. Efficiencies should be gained by managing shared services, but individual agencies still need choice in selecting the services that will make them most effective.
As a third-party vendor to a variety of organizations, Extract certainly gets an up close and personal look at the challenges and efficiencies services procurement can produce. We try to offer services that can help an organization across the board rather than in a specific silo. This is why we work with local governments in their courts as much as we do with their land records, or work with hospitals across their labs, document classification, and population health groups.
If you’d like to learn more about how Extract can be a single point of contact for your redaction, indexing, and classification needs, please reach out today.
About the Author: Chris Mack
Chris is a Marketing Manager at Extract with experience in product development, data analysis, and both traditional and digital marketing. Chris received his bachelor’s degree in English from Bucknell University and has an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. A passionate marketer, Chris strives to make complex ideas more accessible to those around him in a compelling way.