OMB promotes fiscal cooperation

The Office of Management and Budget is encouraging the budget and financial management communities to cooperate as both move to consolidate and standardize under lines of business initiatives.

Budgeting and financial management have a relationship, said Andrew Schoenbach, chief of OMB’s Budget Systems Branch and policy lead of the Budget Formulation and Execution Line of Business consolidation initiative.

Federal budgeting decisions are made by a dynamic process driven by policy, then financial management ensures that individuals do what they say they will, he said at a conference today sponsored by the Association of Government Accountants’ Washington, D.C., chapter and the Greater Washington Society of Certified Public Accountants.

Under the Budget Formulation and Execution LOB, a working group has identified intersections between budgeting and financial management processes in an exposure draft of a Touch-Points document, he said. The group currently is mapping budget execution processes and data flow among agencies, the Treasury Department, OMB and Congress. The goal is to reach a governmentwide consensus process and data model to support the automated data exchange between budget execution and financial management systems.

The Touch-Points document is available at the MAX Federal Community, a wiki that is a key component in developing the Budget Formulation and Execution LOB. MAX has grown to 6,300 federal users. Originally it was for information and document sharing about budget formulation, but it has expanded to other subject communities, such as financial management, homeland security, human capital and performance.

The budget LOB makes 10 capabilities available as common services, including agency budget tools, managing integration, analysis, data collection and tracking, collaboration, and document production. The Budget Formulation and Execution Manager is a shared budget formulation service among six agencies. The manager originally was a Treasury product, but it was modified to be more generic so it could be more widely used. A performance-measure manager module was added recently to establish and track performance metrics, Schoenbach said.

-Mary Mosquera, FCW.com
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The Basics: Lines of Business

When corporations merge, executives routinely consolidate functions that are duplicative. These functions include human resources, back-office operations and information technology. In doing so, executives look to consolidate the business processes and IT systems that support the functions. The idea is a company doesn't need two HR systems, two payment systems, two e-mail systems and so on. After all, consolidation is a large part of what makes the merger financially viable -- creating economies of scale that present efficiencies that reduce unit costs.

The same theory can be applied to government, and the Bush administration has tried to do just that with its lines of business initiative.

Find all you wanted to learn about the lines of business initiative and more in Government Executive's new in-depth profile section: The Basics

-Martin Bosworth, GovExec.com