Financial Management Line of Business Seeks Comments on Guidance

May 24, 2006

GSA # 10243

Contact: Viki Reath 202-501-1231
viki.reath@gsa.gov

WASHINGTON – The U.S. General Services Administration’s Financial Systems Integration Office (FSIO) seeks comments on the Financial Management Line of Business (FMLoB) Migration Planning Guidance, posted on www.fsio.gov.

Comments are due June 12 on the guidance, which is part of a plan to implement the Federal FMLoB, a President’s Management Agenda initiative to help agencies improve the cost, quality, and performance of financial management systems, by fostering efficiencies in federal financial systems and operations.

The guidance is devised to help agencies make good decisions on whether to migrate to a shared service provider, under the FMLoB initiative, which aims to enable agencies to leverage shared services and to implement government-wide reforms to improved financial management services government-wide.

To do this, Federal agencies need to evaluate costs, benefits, and risks of the various alternatives for supporting financial management systems and operations. Shared federal and commercial services may present viable alternatives to in-house solutions to better manage the risk, performance, and cost of implementing and operating financial systems. Specifically, the draft guidance provides:

• Directions for conducting competitions to identify the best shared-service provider.
• Answers to questions on Federal and commercial shared-service providers.
• Tools and templates for:
  • Procurement guidance
  • Change-management guidance.
  • Implementation guidance.
• Menu of services from Federal and commercial shared-service providers
• Service-level agreements

Written comments are due by e-mail by close of business June 12, 2006 to fsio@gsa.gov. Comments should be submitted on the Draft FMLoB Migration Planning Guidance Comment Tracking Sheet found at http://www.fsio.gov.  Questions about the draft guidance should be directed to FSIO@gsa.gov

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