Role of Integration Specialist for a successful Public Sector Implementation

The federal accounting arena is a fairly complex environment. Federal fund accounting as well as financial accounting requirements emanate from multiple complex authorities and agencies. Some of this complexity stems from the fact the oversight bodies for federal executive agencies are from the two different branches of government: executive and legislative.

While the major differences in the financial accounting requirements between the two branches of government was significantly reduced in the 1990s with the passage of reform legislation such as the Chief Financial Offices’ (CFO) Act of 1990 and the Government and Management Reform Act (GMRA ) of 1994 and the establishment of joint boards and advisory councils such as the CFO Council much of the uniqueness of federal fund and financial accounting that has evolved in this heterogeneous environment remains intact today.

In order to have an effective and successful Public Service implementation, it is imperative that Integration Specialist to have a detailed understanding working level knowledge of the external accounting and reporting requirements.

There will be few individuals on a Public Services implementation who have this broad understanding of all of the requirements for the sector or industry. Project team members who work for the client will have a very detailed understanding of very narrow facets of the client’s business requirements which comes from years of working with stove piped business processes in non-integrated legacy systems. However, these “legacy specialist” will not know what the person down the hall needs to have in order to complete the next part of the business process they initiated. Effectively they will not be as knowledgeable about the big picture of requirements which must be met by the agency.

The lack of understanding all of the requirements related to a complex integrated business process, such as contracting for labor services, doesn’t prepare team members well to design an integrated solution in the system. With their provincial knowledge of only one aspect of an integrated business process, certain team members can hold the entire project’s success hostage to unrealistic interpretations of “mandatory” requirements. As the integration specialist confidently armed with a very detailed understanding of the broader set of mandatory accounting or reporting requirements, you must challenge these inflexible interpretations of requirements.

Client project team members working on the project will have a difficult time seeing the benefit of an integrated solution particularly when it doesn’t address their unique interpretations for “mandatory” requirements.

As the integration specialist, you must be prepared to aggressively sell the benefits of integration for meeting all of the requirements of integrated business processes. It is important to remember and not loose site of the fact that you have far more options and flexibility available to meet mandatory requirements outside of the system through the interpretation of what needs to be met: the requirements rather than within the system by working out how to configure a technical solution or workaround. Therefore, it is critical to be an effective integration specialist that you genuinely understand the clients’ external accounting and reporting requirements. Take training courses and keep up to date on requirements!

To begin to understand the financial and fund accounting requirements of the Federal government, you must know the key players in establishing requirements for federal agencies. The central players in this arena of federal accounting requirements are the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the Department of Treasury’s Financial Management Service (FMS), the legislative branch’s General Accounting Office (GAO), the quasi-independent Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB) and the Joint Financial Management Improvement Program (JFMIP).

• Federal accounting environment is composed of many cogent authorities that oversee executive agencies and dictate the requirements for implementing automated financial accounting systems.
• Standardized chart of accounts is required of all federal executive agencies and must be implemented in order to take full advantage of project systems federal solution.
• Budgetary ledger accounting derivation design in federal solution must be very tightly integrated with all modules used in a solution design.
• Federal fund accounting requirements require a simple organizational design that is integrated with the split processing functionality.
• Budgeting with active availability control should only be maintained in financials at the highest level possible with actuals against plans recorded in controlling at the lowest level required.
• Federal purchasing process which starts at requisition and ends with Treasury confirmation requires significant master data integration for proper account determination.
• Prompt Payment Act requirements for making timely payments to vendors and suppliers requires far greater integration of the purchasing process with the payments process.
• Federal year-end processing requires FM and SL carry forwards that are integrated with Treasury’s step for closing SGL accounts.

Key Points for a successful Public Sector Implementation