Hello and thank you for joining us today. I'm very excited to be here with OPM Director Scott Kupor and Principal Deputy Associate Director for HR Solutions Jason Parman. We're going to have a big update today on OPM's HRIT consolidation effort. We know for a long time agencies have been using well over 100 different IT platforms to manage different HR and workforce and personnel processes, and there's this new consolidation effort that's been going on since early in the Trump administration to replace those systems with one unified platform.
I want to start by turning over to Director Kupor. If you can talk about what you see as some of the historic challenges of having such, you know, different and disparate systems for this, and give us an update on where things stand right now.
Yeah, great to see you, Drew. Thanks for spending some time with us today. So, yeah, look, what's what's happened over time — I mean, this is true of a lot of what's happening in government IT — is every agency essentially has done, you know, their own thing. And, you know, look, that that makes sense in some cases, but in cases like core HRIT, which is what we're talking about here, there's way more commonality than there is bespoke need for customization here. And so, for a long time, what this has meant is, number one, is we have actually 119 systems to be exact, or at least I will say that's as far as we can count. Jason and and team may may may find a few others as we go through this process. But there's a bunch of disparate systems, and there's really a number of problems with that. Number one is they actually don't talk to one another. And so, every time we want to actually report on data around what's happening in the workforce or stuff, we have to actually go out and literally manually get people to pull data from systems so that we can consolidate here at OPM, so that we can then present it in a way that makes sense.
What it also means is it creates all kinds of downstream problems for just managing somebody's life cycle in government. So, you know, give you a great example. We run the retirement services operations, as Drew, you and I talked about before, which has been fraught with all kinds of challenges over time. And one of the big challenges is if you work at different agencies over the course of your career in government, we don't have a canonical view of what your entire work history is literally until you start to fill out a retirement application. And so our ability to kind of get that information, get you timely retirement, is all kind of, you know, gated by those types of things. Um, and then the final thing I'll just mention is, look, it creates tremendous inefficiency. So huge inefficiency is number one from a spend perspective. So, you know, we spend billions of dollars a year just on these systems alone. Uh, and then also the human capital spend is tremendous because when you talk to HR professionals, the amount of time that they tell us that they spend babysitting, you know, outdated systems, pulling data from systems, dealing with issues that employees should be able to do from a self-service perspective, but those, you know, kind of uh systems just don't actually keep pace with what's happening. All of that just uh is quite frankly just money that's going out the door for the taxpayer.
Over the last year or so, the Trump administration has, you know, undertaken this new effort at OPM uh to try to consolidate uh all of these systems and just create instead a unified uh one system for all agencies to use. Can you talk about uh where that effort stands right now and what the latest developments are?
Yeah, so uh we are um literally have just uh when this when this airs, we will have just awarded a contract to uh a vendor who will be responsible for helping us get the system stood up and running. Um, one might rightly ask why, you know, we're sitting here now, you know, 18 months into the Trump administration, uh why are we now just awarding this? And I can tell you this is not for an enormous amount of effort from Jason and his team. And quite frankly, we've had lots of different people across uh OPM and other organizations helping us. Uh, the federal procurement process is, I would say, probably not the most efficient uh process that exists in the federal government. Uh, it takes a very long time to do these things. Um, we've stood up a team, and Jason, correct me, but I think like 50 plus people we've had just on this evaluation team who have, you know, knocked the cover off of every different technology bell and whistle and all the different competitor sites and have gone through and literally done days and days of demos and reviews and technical pieces and contract reviews. And you know, along the way also as we kind of whittled down the number of folks, we got a couple protests from people who didn't make the process. So that extended the process. So anyways, the good news is we're at the award stage. What that means is like the day after tomorrow basically, you know, Jason and his team have already started this process, but they are going to literally start fanning out to the phase one agencies who are on the list to basically be able to be the first deployment agencies for the system. And we're going to be hard at work at no longer dealing with procurement, but actually the first phase of implementation of the system.
And I do want to talk more about that phase one and how that implementation is going to start looking, but just a couple follow-up questions about the procurement process and and some of the the protests that we saw a couple months ago. You know, given that that kind of delayed this timeline, and I just kind of wanted to get an update on what your timeline for implementation is. What does that look like today? And do you expect those delays to affect the full rollout of all of this?
Yes, so our original timeline was to try to get this done kind of in the 2017 fiscal years. You can essentially take the time period that we've been delayed through this process, which we were hoping to award the contract actually in January. So call it like add plus six months onto that is how we think about what the current timeframe looks like. You know, look, I know Jason and team. We will we will do everything we can if there is any way to do it to bring that in, but I think unfortunately as these things go, you kind of you know, when when you start to push the go button is really when we can really start to measure progress here.
And do you think in in the process after there's this award that's coming out soon, do you anticipate there being any other delays, any other potential protests along the way, and is that something that you're equipped to to deal with as those come?
Well, look, we certainly don't know. It's uh always hard to predict these things, but look, I can tell you the team has done an incredibly thorough process. So, again, this has been going on for a very long period of time. As I mentioned, we had more than 50 people who just literally almost all they've done for the last 9 months or so has been to kind of, you know, make sure everybody there's a level playing field both on the commercial side on the technical side. So, look, that's out of our hands. What, you know, what we're committed to doing is we've been using this delay that we had to make sure that all the prep work that we could do with all the agencies is up and running. So, you know, our hope is to be able to actually deliver on behalf of American taxpayers. You know, if things come up that delay that, obviously, look, we'll deal with it as they come, but I'm highly confident in the work the team has done and our ability to successfully defend any challenges to this process.
And as you're kind of starting through this, you know, the onboarding process, you mentioned phase one. Can you talk about, you know, next steps now after this contract is awarded, who are those agencies that are going to be starting with this, and what's that initial transition going to look like?
Yeah, I'm glad to weigh in here. So, Drew, I appreciate the question. And as Scott said, the work has already begun, right? We're pressing the go button with a selected vendor, and our our very first order of business is onboarding that vendor, and then configuring a federal platform, configuring one version of truth, one version of capability for the federal government. This This will realize all of the benefits that Scott was saying, right? Rather than 119 different versions of the same data field or the same capability. We are at OPM, which really should be in the center of this ecosystem, right? Going to account for agency-specific flexibilities, but also drive the kind of standardization, consistency, federal employee and practitioner experience so that uh we can roll out this federally configured instance of our selected vendor. So, that's the very next work to do.
Simultaneously, we'll really be ramping up our efforts with the vendor partner and with our uh wave one agencies on data migration. We've already done uh quite a bit of work with uh uh data migration playbooks, agency readiness uh preparation, um uh handbooks that we've been working with all of our agencies, but especially those who will go first. And so, as as Scott said, hitting the go button enables us to then leverage that vendor partner, which will have all of their demonstrated capabilities, all of our fit gap requirements, um uh you know, worked out, and all those configurations ready, so that agencies can effectively and rapidly transition to the new platform.
And can you talk about just from more of a practical perspective, what are the things that are going to be available on this platform? Uh, what are HR professionals or employees going to see when they uh when they use this?
Yeah, so as a as a long-time career HR practitioner myself, um I I sometimes joke that while I've been here a long time, certain experiences uh as an HR practitioner are very much like they were 30 years ago when I started. And this isn't exactly what we intend to improve. So, as an HR practitioner, we're asked to make impactful enterprise-level workforce strategy decisions and and inform strategic decisions from leadership. Uh, and that's based on data that we have to go out and get. And from OPM's perspective, that often takes months. We get incomplete, inconsistent responses, things like that. I mean, imagine if you asked one workforce-related question and you got 119 slightly different variations of the same answer. It takes people, it takes money, and it takes time, and it and it disallows us from making decisions about the workforce we have now, or, dare I even dream, the workforce we might envision having in the near future.
Now, replace that with what we intend to do from the HR practitioner standpoint, and those questions are answerable in real time from a single platform, and a single dashboard, or a single set of decision-informing data that we can view and and and help make enterprise strategy decisions at scale in in and quickly. So, that's that's transformative for the day-to-day business of the HR practitioner. But, as anyone who's ever worked in any large organization realizes, HR is that underpinning foundation of kind of all of our basic needs as employees. If if we get married, if we have a life change event, we need to make sure our our insurance changes appropriately. We need to make sure we're getting paid appropriately in the right spot, things like that. And too often, even if we stay at the same agency, those decisions, those those processes have toil involved, have lots of human interaction, and sometimes even have paper. And heaven forbid that we should take our skills to the private sector and back, or to another agency, and now we have an entire other set of records, because they don't automatically follow us seamlessly. And that just compounds the complexity and and degrades the experience of the federal employee, or someone who wants to work with or for the federal government, or who's serviced by the federal government. So, fast forward to when we have this unified platform, and now that record follows the employee seamlessly. No matter how many times we go in or out of government, no matter which agencies we go to. And so, not only does that reduce toil, reduce human capital expense, and and increase that employee's experience, but I don't think it's unfair to say then, you're freed up to do more of that mission-critical work that ultimately is going to benefit those who receive services from the federal government, those who receive benefits from the federal government, and I think it improves the experience for all of us. I I see a I see a tremendous improvement in both the lives of the HR practitioner at the federal level, but also all of those communities that the HR practitioner impacts.
I would just say the other piece to me that's very exciting about this is think of this as this becomes the centerpiece for how we create effectively a unified set of applications that every federal employee can follow from literally I mean I hate to use the term but from cradle to grave, right? So, you know, right now we have disparate systems for HR, we have disparate systems for you know, health insurance sign-ups, for life insurance, for retirement, for you know, everything you need to do in your life cycle change. So, you can imagine a smart system where in the future, you know, I get married for example and so I need to go into the HR system and update my you know, marital status. Well, that tells me then oh, you know, do you want to add that person to your health insurance? Well, of course I do because it now knows that. Or by the way, do you know when you get when you retire, you might need to add this person as a beneficiary. Do you want us to update your beneficiary files and retirement? Like, you know, the opportunities are endless but what this does is basically drive an enormous amount of kind of self-service and more more importantly, the ability for us to actually, you know, kind of be able to make the employee experience much more seamless.
