Bush Administration Coins New Name for Competitive Sourcing
According to The Federal Times:
Competitive sourcing by any other name is still competitive sourcing. But as the Bush administration gets ready to bow out, it’s testing that adage by rechristening the controversial initiative: commercial services management.
The Office of Management and Budget changed the name, it says, to recognize the fact that agencies have broader means to fulfill the goals of the initiative, part of the president’s management agenda. Competitive sourcing involved using job competitions — between contractors and federal employees — to determine whether federal or private-sector employees could perform a government function more efficiently. Commercial services management, however, includes other forms of business reorganization that do not involve the private sector, said Jane Lee, an OMB spokeswoman.
“The commercial services management initiative recognizes that agencies are working to improve the operation of their commercial functions and using a variety of techniques to do so,” Lee said.
The management initiative includes the use of competitive sourcing, but it also calls for agencies to create so-called high-performing organizations (HPOs) and to re-engineer their business processes, Lee said. Public-private competition, HPOs and business process re-engineering all rely on the same “common-sense management disciplines,” such as cost and workload analysis, to achieve efficiencies, she said...click to continue.
