Management

GSA Selects OPM as Third Centers of Excellence Agency

OPM wants to get a handle on legacy IT and strengthen technology planning and governance.

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Phil Goldstein is a former web editor of the CDW family of tech magazines and a veteran technology journalist. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and their animals: a dog named Brenna, and two cats, Grady and Princess.

The Centers of Excellence train keeps on chugging.

On Friday, the General Services Administration announced that it had selected the Office of Personnel Management as the third agency to go through the CoE IT Modernization program it has been running, following the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Agriculture Department.

In a statement, GSA said it will work with OPM to “help stabilize OPM’s legacy IT systems and enable the agency to modernize its IT capabilities and methods.” The CoE work that OPM will embark on will also help kickstart “structural change needed to support OPM’s critical human capital strategy mission with 21st century IT infrastructure,” according to the GSA.

The five CoEs are run by the GSA and based around cloud adoption, IT infrastructure optimization, customer experience, service delivery analytics and contact centers. The goal of the centers is to accelerate modernization by leveraging private-sector expertise and talent, and to provide agencies with consulting and IT engineering services to radically improve the way they design services and interact with their citizens.

The CoE and GSA IT teams will focus on four key areas identified by OPM: IT workforce planning; IT planning and governance; mainframe and disaster recovery planning; and OPM’s retirement services technology portfolio.

“The time to address structural changes at OPM is now and GSA is helping us meet the needs of the federal workforce,” OPM Acting Director Margaret Weichert says in a statement. “Aging IT infrastructure at OPM has put the agency in an unsustainable position and hurt OPM’s critical human capital mission. By partnering with GSA — a proven leader in federal IT and technology contracting — through the CoEs, we are taking steps toward long-overdue transformation in OPM’s IT infrastructure and operations.”