Inside the Reporter’s Notebook – OPM’s customer service falters as Employee Express is overwhelmed

CORRECTION: The Interior Department doesn’t host Employee Express. It is hosted by OPM. Federal News Radio regrets the error.

Inside the Reporter’s Notebook is a weekly dispatch of news and information you may have missed or that slipped through the cracks at conferences, hearings and other events. This is not a column or commentary – it’s news tidbits, strongly-sourced buzz, and other items of interest that have happened or are happening in the federal IT and acquisition communities.

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OPM’s customer service falters as Employee Express is overwhelmed

Few federal employees will fault the Office of Personnel Management for taking extra steps to protect their data. But recent cyber upgrades to the Employee Express platform are not only leaving federal employees frustrated, the effort is yet another lesson for other agencies of what not to do when it comes to customer service.

First a little background: Employee Express is the online portal run by OPM. The website lets federal employees control their payroll-personnel information by making changes or updates to information such as their addresses, tax withholdings, health coverage and the Thrift Savings Plan.

According to OPM’s website, the departments of Education, Interior, State and Transportation use the portal, as well as more than 70 medium and small agencies — such as the General Services Administration, the National Archives and Records Administration and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

So this brings us to the latest problem for OPM: The extra cybersecurity requirements are slowing down the system, causing federal employees to call the help desk, thus overloading the help desk and slowing the entire process down during a critical time of the year, Open Season. And this isn’t a typical Open Season, when 95 percent or more of federal employees don’t make any changes to their insurance. With the addition of the self-plus one option, the volume of calls and website visits is huge.

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DHS financial management saga adds new wrinkle to ongoing debate

The question of where industry fits into the Office of Management and Budget’s renewed shared services initiative continues to be a hot topic across the community.

OMB and the Treasury Department have said industry’s role will be one of support to the federal shared services centers.

But is there room for industry to be a shared service provider? Or has that ship passed because of poor past performances?

A long-standing challenge of the Homeland Security Department’s plan to move to the Interior Business Center could be industry’s last gasp or a sign of things to come for financial management shared services.

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Commerce, USDA lose senior executives

The federal community has seen a plethora of retirements and senior executives deciding it’s time to move on.

We’ve reported on significant changes such as Frank Baitman, the chief information officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, and Mark Day, deputy assistant commissioner in the Integrated Technology Services office in the Federal Acquisition Service, leaving government.

But there were several others that flew under the radar.

Jeff Press, the Commerce Department’s deputy director of performance strategy, decided to move to the private sector. Press, whose last day at Commerce was Nov. 13, joins Socrata to lead its government performance practice, according to an email obtained by Federal News Radio.

Press joined Commerce in August 2014 after spending almost four years as a senior advisor and executive director of the Performance Council.

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