Financial and Business Management System

The story of the Business Integration Office (the BIO) is linked to the story of the Financial and Business Management System (FBMS) and good stewardship of taxpayer dollars.

The concept of an enterprise business management solution took root at Interior in the late 1990s when it became necessary to plan for the replacement of aging financial and acquisition systems that were not meeting business needs and were no longer supported by vendors. The idea to implement a modern, integrated solution was championed by leaders across DOI’s business policy community. Appropriations to support the effort were first provided in 2004.

The Department used an incremental approach to deploy FBMS with groupings of bureaus “going live” each year. Full deployment across the Department was completed in November of 2013, and marked a significant achievement in the Federal government; no other cabinet level agency has conceived, created and successfully deployed a software solution on the scale and scope of FBMS.

Deployment and maintenance of the FBMS solution has been managed by the BIO that reports to the Deputy Assistant Secretary Budget, Finance, Grants & Acquisition. Aligning the BIO and FBMS with other business offices helps to ensure that our path forward is based on the identification and vetting of specific business challenges and creating the best approach for the optimization and leveraging of FBMS to meet those needs. This unique approach has been essential to the success of FBMS because it means that the BIO subject matter experts who work with our Bureau customers to design, enhance, and leverage the business solution, are also instrumental in writing the code to implement that design.

Today, the FBMS solution supports business management processes related to financial management, budget execution, acquisition, grants and cooperative agreements, real and personal property management, fleet management, aviation, travel, enterprise information management and reporting. To date, the implementation of FBMS has allowed the decommissioning of 86 legacy systems.