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duce this service.’ Then whether Step A comes after Step B but after Deci- sion C is no longer relevant to the service being delivered or its output.”
A new public/private partnership
Many participants noted that shared services require a different kind of sup- port from industry. “There’s a balance between the role that industry plays and the role that government plays. Those roles have to be clari ed,” one executive said, adding that companies need to “stop letting us tell them what we think we want because we never really know.”
Another participant agreed. “We need somebody to be able to say, ‘Are you sure? Why is that a need? What are you not going to accomplish if you don’t have that?’”
Some members of the group said they’d like to see companies work together to meet the government’s needs. “What I ask is that industry starts talking to industry,” one exec- utive said. “Figure out who’s already made investments in things and what’s working today, and partner in a way that’s going to bring value to the fed- eral government.”
One executive, however, pointed out that “the acquisition model that
all of us contributed to drives toward a winner-take-all, me-versus-you men- tality. There’s not an incentive to cre- ate this kind of discussion.”
Therefore, another participant con- cluded, “the only possible way around the dilemma is to gure out a differ- ent public/private partnership model because money is simply not going to be available.”
“Companies don’t have to build core nance systems because they already exist,” one executive said. Agencies could instead tell companies what they need that might not exist, and “businesses could partner togeth- er and say, ‘This company’s going to offer the core. I can build the federal thing you need, and together we actu- ally have a solution.’” n
PERSPECTIVES
Participants
Elizabeth Angerman
Executive Director, Of ce of Uni ed Shared Services Management, General Services Administration
Dan Chenok
Executive Director, IBM Center for the Business of Government
David Grant
Associate Administrator for Mission Support, Federal Emergency Management Agency
Steve Krauss
Director, Category Management Strategic Execution, General Services Administration
Jesse Samberg
Shared Services Director, Global Business Services, Public Service, IBM
Mary Sprague
Associate Administrator, Department of Transportation
MichaelTorres
Program Manager, HR Line of Business, Human CapitalTransformation, Of ce of Personnel Management
Note: FCW Editor-in-ChiefTroy K. Schneider led the roundtable discussion. The Dec. 6, 2017, gathering was underwritten by IBM, but both the substance of the discussion and the recap on these pages are strictly editorial products. Neither IBM nor any of the roundtable participants had input beyond their Dec. 6 comments.
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