An interesting article by Jason Miller from Federal News Radio, http://www.federalnewsradio.com/145/3451148/GSA-plans-to-stop-providing-HR-shared-services. GSA provides HR services to 40 agencies, per the article, covering approximately 30,000 employees, of which 18,000 are GSA employees.
Private companies have, in some cases, outsourced capabilities that were not ‘core’ to their value-add in the marketplace. They do so because it allows their management to focus on their core mission and, hopefully, allows that capability to be provided for lower cost. The term often used for the provider is “shared-service” since multiple organizations are sharing the costs and infrastructure of the provider.
The Federal Government has gone through a number of iterations of shared-services provisioning, ending up with small numbers of government agencies and departments providing shared capabilities in a number of areas, including as this article discusses, HR.
The GSA Administrator, Dan Tangherlini, decided to have GSA focus on its core missions and thus get out of the HR shared services ‘business’.
As I have pointed out, one of the fundamental problems with how the Federal Government implements shared services is that the only government agency that has, as its formal mission, providing shared services is DISA, which was set up to provide shared IT services for DoD.
A case can be made that DHS could be the shared-services provider for cybersecurity for Civilian entities with its increasing policy role in that area. With some minor exceptions, however, there is no organizational logic for most of the rest of the shared service locations, however well meaning the attempt has been.
If the Federal Government was serious about shared services, I have long felt it is necessary to create a Civilian version of DISA to be the home for Federal shared services operations. One option would be to add that as a core mission responsibility of GSA, but unless or until that were to be put in place legislatively, it is a rational stance, in my opinion, for GSA to be taking the stance it is.
Comments
One response to “GSA Planning to End Its HR Shared Services”
Well, I believe it’s really a tough decision for GSA and hope this decision was taken after going through all points of view for the growth of the company and finally it will sure very bad for the employees who are employed under GSA HR services and they should look for some other employment.