Lines of business initiatives move ahead

CAMBRIDGE, Md. — Making lines of business efforts work is mostly a matter of planning ahead, according to panelists who spoke today at the Interagency Resources Management Conference.

"Big failures tend to be on the people side, the management side, and not on the technology side," said Larry Neff, deputy chief financial officer at the Transportation Department.

DOT runs a financial management shared-services center with the Government Accountability Office as its single largest user, and some smaller agencies are also signed on. The Financial Management Line of Business initiative is intended to concentrate financial management information technology services into a few agencies, which then provide the services to other agencies. The goal is to lower overall costs by reducing the duplication that comes when each agency runs its own financial management operation.

Smaller agencies have been the most eager users to sign up with the shared-services centers. Anton Porter, deputy CFO at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said small agencies are hard-pressed to manage their own systems and welcome the help.

"They're very mission-oriented," he said. "What the shared-services model provides is the opportunity for the small agencies to focus strictly on mission."

Small agencies trying to run their own IT operations typically have little resilience, said John O'Connor, director of GAO's office of financial management.

-Michael Hardy, 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