Future of the Federal Financial Management Workforce

Take agile government principles, add strategic foresight, shake with CPAs, and you get a vision from the Chief Financial Officers Council to build a federal financial management (FM) workforce and the “CFO of the Future Now- The 2030 Plan.”

The effort began in 2019 as a grassroots movement but quickly gained support of the CFO Council, which launched an interagency working group, and this past month was endorsed by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to continue forward.

“We realized the future FM workforce needs would be different, but we didn’t know exactly how. So we turned to strategic foresight,” said Steve Kunze, Department of Commerce Deputy CFO and one of the working group members behind the 2030 plan. Strategic foresight is an organizational, social, and personal practice that enables creation of functional and operational views of alternative futures and possibilities, which can be used to aid planning.

Working with the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)’s Strategic Workforce Foresight Team led by Eric Popiel, the working group began with a foresight exercise that allowed the team to set out a 1.0 draft of a FM strategic workforce plan which served as one of three core pillars for the work. The two additional pillars guiding the workgroup’s efforts were: 2) using pilots to test ideas, such as different approaches to streamlined hiring efforts for accountants, and 3) developing a common shared training portal to consolidate learning opportunities and reduce duplication.

Within six months, the three pillar strategy had the support of the CFO Council, which formalized the working group. “We all recognized the need to keep up our FM workforce skills current, and also match the training and learning experience new hires would be used to,” Kunze told FEDmanager.

Soon after, the group was called in by the leadership of the Joint Financial Management and Improvement Program (JFMIP), which includes the leaders of the Department of the Treasury, OMB, OPM, and the Government Accountability Office (GAO), who subsequently adopted the FM workforce modernization initiative as their own and provided additional high level support.

Over the past two years, CFOs, GAO, and the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE) have also collaborated on the effort, including coordinated focus on skills and competencies related to new technology and audit techniques, such as including Robotics Processing Automation (RPA) or machine learning / artificial intelligence (ML/AI), as they are all seeking to better deliver “both decision support and more robust, meaningful compliance,” Kunze said. 

Reflecting on the two years working on the initiative, Popiel, the OPM futurist, noted to FEDmanager, “The COVID-19 pandemic shocked the government into thinking differently about people, skills, and the way to work. This group was already thinking differently and willing to take a risk. This effort is a great example of strategic foresight being embraced across the enterprise by CFO Act agencies.”

Embracing a focus on FM workforce skills, as opposed to system standards which long have been the focus of the JFMIP, is a return to the CFO Act’s core tenants from its inception in the early 1990s, Mike Wetklow, National Science Foundation Deputy CFO and working group member, told FEDmanager.

“We can see where we need to go now,” Wetklow said, referring to the three pillars of the working group’s plan, underpinned by necessary data and systems, “and that is to focus on our people.”

“[The CFO of the Future Now- The 2030 Plan] provides a roadmap for the future of the CFOC Financial Management workforce as we move past the 30th Anniversary of the CFO Act,” according to Wetklow. “The plan includes seven strategic actions including agile user story style scenarios to describe the work to be done and delivered as we move from planning to execution. Projects resulting from this plan will be prioritized by value (not compliance), where the highest value will be delivered first. The connection among these strategic actions is straight forward. Our aim is to be ‘The CFO of the Future Now’.”

Both Mike Wetklow and Steve Kunze also spoke to Government Matters TV about “The CFO of the Future Now- The 2030 Plan.” Hear more about the plan and what they had to say here.