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"Shared Services" project on union leaders' radar; L-M committee to meet Sept. 25

Sept. 10, 2008 - OCSEA will be monitoring closely a new management initiative called the “Shared Services Project” that will be examining business processes and transactions in an effort to make government more efficient and responsive.

Anne Saunier from the Office of Budget and Management recently met with 50 OCSEA leaders about the project: “We are talking about enabling a way to make those [business] processes less cumbersome and hopefully save the state money,” she said. Saunier asked to speak with the group to personally address questions from the union’s leadership and solicit their involvement.

According to Saunier, the state is examining only financial transactions called “procurement to payment” or “record to report” transactions to determine how the work gets done in each agency, what duties are being performed and by whom. The state intends to determine which processes should remain in each agency and which processes could be “shared” through a Shared Services Center.

Many of these transactions are performed by OCSEA bargaining unit employees. Roughly 250-300 OCSEA employees perform some part of these duties.

The state has asked OCSEA to partner on the Shared Services Project, too, and come up with “a new way of working together.” The union has partnered with the state on similar projects, most recently, the Information Technology reclassification project that is seeking to improve the antiquated IT classification system.

Noting that a centralized “financial center” would focus on reducing the management to bargaining unit ratio, Saunier indicated, “We are committed to this center being a flat organization.”

The state has said it wants to ensure the business processes stay state-operated and are performed by OCSEA bargaining unit employees. The Shared Services Project could give labor and management an opportunity to explore some alternative approaches to core work processes that use, for example, self-directed work teams, alternative work scheduling and other high performance workplace approaches.

Work on the project is already underway. Teams that include Subject Matter Experts have been sent into agencies to look at about 15 processes related to paying bills and charging accounts.

Under the first phase of the project, the state is looking to revamp some financial processes and explore the advantages of centralizing some of these into a financial processing center. It is anticipated that the project will “go live” with the pilot agencies in the first quarter of 2010.

A joint labor and management committee that includes OCSEA leadership will meet in September to begin discussions.

“It is our hope to influence outcomes in a way that reduces or eliminates negative impact to our members and, at the same time, help create a center that departs from the typical top-heavy management structure prevalent in so many agencies,” said OCSEA senior staff Carol Bowshier.

While the state says they can’t promise there will be no layoffs, they said layoffs would be their absolute last resort. The state says it is their hope that affected employees would be reassigned to other functions or possibly employed by the new center and that any job loss would be mitigated through attrition.

See Related

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