“ACF is the largest grant-making agency in the federal government, outside of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, so our motivation was somewhat selfish,” Horn said. “As a part of the one-department strategy, we were going to consolidate from seven grants management systems to two. We had to make our case to be one of the two systems.”

Horn’s team not only convinced then-HHS secretary Tommy Thompson that ACF should be a department provider, but also sold the Office of Management and Budget on the idea later that year when the administration asked for proposals for the Grants LOB.

Now, more than a year after being named a shared-services provider for the entire government, ACF is moving to a new online management system, finding success in signing up non-HHS agencies and improving the way it is managing grants while also bringing down costs.

“Our salary and expense costs go down as we bring others on board,” Horn said. “And costs to the other agencies go down as well as we get more customers.”

Curtis Coy, ACF’s deputy assistant secretary, added that the operating costs of the GrantSolutions.gov system decreased to about $3.2 million from $5 million for the previous Grants Administration Tracking and Evaluation System (GATES) since becoming a shared-services provider.

Horn said that the savings from taking on new customers let ACF keep 20 people working on mission-critical projects.

“HHS has had to downsize in recent years so, without that $2 million, there would be 20 fewer people on staff,” he said.

ACF has 14 customers within HHS, including CMS and the Office of Public Health and Science, as well as three agencies from outside — the Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions and the Denali Commission.

Coy said that, on average, agencies pay about $200 per transaction to cover operating costs and maintenance of the system.

ACF’s costs will continue to drop and the management of grants will improve as more and more agency customers use the Web version of GrantSolutions.gov.

Coy said agency customers started migrating last month and will continue into 2008.
ACF spent about $2 million to upgrade the discretionary award module from client-server technology to one using Java 2 Enterprise Edition.

The agency upgraded the other parts of the GrantSolutions.gov system using J2EE in 2004.