Erika Rissi and Stacy Boyd spoke about the new GMLOB strategic landscape. Some interesting developments here, including the new GMLOB Strategic Landscape. 

I missed the start of this session because I felt compelled to eat. Yes, I’m a fat mess. But as a satiated one, I took pretty good notes and picked up the rest from a handout… 

There are now four GMLOB groups: 

• Consortium Leaders Partnership Groups: HHS/ACF (partners are CNCS, DOT, EPA, IMLS, State, Treasury, and VA), Education (Interior, DOJ/COPS), and NSF (DOD, NASA)
• Strategic Partnership Group: NEH, NARA, NEA
• Alternative Solutions Group: HHS/NIH, DOE, SBA, USAID
• Agencies Yet to Align: DHS, DOC, DOJ/OJP & OVW, DOL, HUD, SSA, USDA

The Consortium Leaders are continuing down the path they’ve been on for a while. The Strategic Partnership Group has been working on collaborating together for some time, sharing common needs as smaller Federal grant-making agencies. 

Some agencies were given waivers to proceed on their current system development efforts. NIH is one of these. Energy, USAID, and SBA all wanted to implement the same COTS product, and OMB thought that it would be good to have that play out and see how the situation develops. [Note: Earlier in the day an Energy person said that they are implementing Compusearch PRISM Grants.] 

The remaining agencies (the ‘Agencies Yet to Align’) need to do additional work to determine whether they can appeal or align with another agency. These agencies each have their own deadlines with regards to this work. 

The vision for GMLOB is nirvana and the path that the initiative is on will enables us to get to nirvana. Looking at standards now — in terminology, interfaces, data, and so on — and currently surveying the community to see which standards would be most helpful. The Consortium Leads will work together to develop and establish these standards. Those agencies that have been granted an appeal will be expected to adopt the standards developed by this process. 

Subaward Pilot: They are currently examining how they might implement this system, and there’s been some discussion of using a centralized Web site to do that. 

GMLOB now has a good picture of the current situation — who’s working with whom, and so on. GMLOB now has a list of things that they want to work on, and that list needs to be vetted with agencies and OMB. Now looking for input from the community as a whole — agencies, grantees, etc. — to determine what standards (for example) may be most helpful and useful. So there will be some targeted outreach activities. Login/password/authentication and payments standards were discussed at this session. Also discussed:

Reusing the Grants.gov tracking number and standardizing tracking numbers across government

The National Grants Partnership published a white paper about grants management standards in November 2007; GMLOB should refer to that for some ideas