ICYMI: CFO's Role in Delivering Value Through Customer Experience

An amazing panel discussion from a recent ACT-IAC CX SUMMIT, focuses on the synergy between financial management and service delivery. Moderated by Steven Boberski, with experts Clarence Crawford, Thomas Coleman, and Sarah Cunningham. They explore the role of CFOs in enhancing customer experience, strategic advising, and leveraging technology, like AI, for efficiency. They also discuss challenges like unfunded mandates and the evolving role of CFOs in the federal government. The episode highlights the importance of collaboration and creative problem-solving in achieving agency goals.

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Intro/Outro Music: See a Brighter Day/Gloria Tells
Courtesy of Epidemic Sound

(Episodes 1-159: Intro/Outro Music: Focal Point/Young Community
Courtesy of Epidemic Sound)

Chapters

• 2:24 Panel Introductions
• 3:34 The Evolving Role of CFOs
• 4:58 Strategic Advisor and Transformation Architect
• 10:09 Balancing Risk and Budget Constraints
• 19:55 Leveraging Technology and AI
• 20:54 Public Engagement and Transparency
• 41:37 Procurement and Market Research
• 48:16 Panel Introduction and Background
• 49:35 Moderator Introduction and Panel Setup
• 50:21 Panelist Introductions
• 51:30 The Evolving Role of CFOs
• 58:06 Balancing Risk and Budget Constraints
• 1:08:12 Customer Experience and CFOs
• 1:17:44 Leveraging AI and Technology
• 1:28:53 Procurement and Market Engagement

Transcript

Yohanna: [00:00:00] Before we get started, if you're listening from our website, make sure you're following the buzz on your favorite podcast app. You can follow the show on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen that ensures you get all future episodes as soon as they drop.
Yohanna: Hey there and welcome back. I'm your host Joanna Baez, and I'm happy you're joining us today. A few weeks ago, ACT IAC held a fantastic customer experience event. And for those of you who might have missed it, don't worry, we've got you covered. This panel discusses the intersection of financial management and service delivery.
Yohanna: Get ready to be inspired as we explore the future of customer experience together. 
Martha Dorris: So while the pa the panel is coming up, I just wanted to, um, give a little background on this. Um. [00:01:00] As a community that focuses on customer experience and service delivery, we've known for years the efficiency gains that you can, you can get from applying a customer focused, customer centric, um, philosophy.
Martha Dorris: So we've long known that we needed to engage the chief financial officers within agencies as you're creating your business cases and getting them to understand what customer experience is, understand the efficiency gains. And so this is the first time that we've really brought together the CFO community with the customer experience and service, um, delivery community.
Martha Dorris: So I would like to introduce our moderator, um, who will be Steve Borsky, the private sector, CTO for Genesis Public Sector. 
 Steven Boberski: Yes. 
Martha Dorris: Tell me again. Public sector. Public, what did I say? Private sector. Private sector. 
 Steven Boberski: I wish I was a private sector. CTO that would. Really cool. We have one of those, 
Martha Dorris: well, my notes say private sector, so it's [00:02:00] not my fault.
Martha Dorris: Anyway, welcome to this panel and, um, as, as you're listening to this, think about as agencies and, and industry, as you're helping your government clients, they need to start talking to their CFOs and getting them engaged in this conversation. So I'm thrilled to, to, uh, hear what you guys have to say. Thank you.
 Steven Boberski: Turn these on, by the way. Okay. I probably don't need a mic, but, um, we'll do some quick introductions. My name's Steve Oberski, as you said. I work for Genesis. We are a, um, an AI powered, uh, experience orchestration platform. Carter Magic quadrant leader for c. If you'd like to learn more about that, we've got a booth in the back.
 Steven Boberski: Love to have chat with you. Um, and, uh, let just work right through the panel. This is great. 
Clarence Crawford: Hi, Clarence Crawford. I'm a retired, uh, federal CFO and I'm also, um, adjunct professor at American 
 Thomas Coleman: University. 
 Thomas Coleman: Nice to be with you all today. I am Tom Coleman. I am the former, uh, CFO of Treasury Federal Financing [00:03:00] Bank, and look forward to having this discussion.
Sarah Cunningham: Good morning. I am Sarah Cunningham. I used to be Sarah Berg for those that are in federal creditee stuff. Uh, my background is I've been a govey for most of my career. I'm currently a partner with Summit, but I was the assistant chief financial officer for budget at hud, acting in many different capacities over my time, getting into all sorts of cool things on the CFO side.
Sarah Cunningham: And I also spent three years as a local government, CFO, so kinda, uh, from the OMB side to the recipient side. Looking forward to today, 
 Steven Boberski: it is really exciting. Martha pointed out, uh, correctly that, you know, we really don't get an opportunity to put the CFOs up here. You know, you think customer experience gets ct, OCIO, cus CXOs customer experience, chief Knowledge officers.
 Steven Boberski: But the, the, the charter for the CFO and the federal government is, is not just financial, right? You have financial stewardship and, and management. You have the risk management, but you're also supposed to be a strategic advisor and, and a transformation architect. How do you balance those roles? Clarence?
Clarence Crawford: I think that [00:04:00] one of the things that, as I talk to CFOs around, I tell them that if the only thing you can do is talk about money, uh, you're being overpaid. Um, your job is in, in, in essence to improve and increase value. So being able to understand and being able to communicate that and being able to, and the CFO's uniquely positioned to be able to see across the enterprise and then be able to offer suggestions, uh, that others cannot do.
 Thomas Coleman: I 
 Thomas Coleman: would absolutely agree with what Clarence says. The way I think of it is kind of, there's like a Maslow's hierarchy of CFO needs, and at the bottom of that is financial audit. You need to pass one of those risk management, payment integrity, those are all really, really important. We could talk about that, but that's a different conference above that is continuing evolution.
 Thomas Coleman: And it's exactly, you know, as was mentioned, the role of strategic advisor. And [00:05:00] so I think of those two words kind of as separate objectives for a, uh, modern CFO from a strategy perspective. And, and this is exactly what Clarence mentioned, you know, most offices in agencies think about their money in one year terms.
 Thomas Coleman: And only in terms of their program, what the CFO can do, especially in the CX space. And I've got a recent example from A-C-F-O-I was talking to is, you know, if they have a system that's a legacy system, it's a, in this case it was a lending platform that the public had to interact with. They need to modernize it.
 Thomas Coleman: Well, there's not the budget, um, in the CFO, who's the product owner to modernize that. But on the other side, in a completely different office, there's a gigantic help desk contract. And that contract is huge because the system doesn't allow for self-service. The system is complicated. It doesn't have some of those automated data checks on applications that the prior panel talked about.
 Thomas Coleman: So A CFO can look across the [00:06:00] organization and think in multi-year, how do I get from A to B? And how do I do that in a way that I can advocate even with level resources, where to make cuts to get to a point where the agency is operating in a more efficient manner. And that's really the strategic role. I think the advisor role is also important.
 Thomas Coleman: You know, a lot of times, you know, it's easy for a CFO to say, I need to be involved in every decision, and then everyone rolls their eyes when you have to approve their procurement. But if you can provide something of value. And from a CFO shop, what we do really well is data-driven decision making and help organizations when they're looking to make these purchases, think strategically about how do I get best value?
 Thomas Coleman: I remember about seven years ago when all these conferences had RPA instead of ai, and there were a lot of procurements in the RPA space. I was with a product company. We were competing for a lot of these, and a few of those said, you know, propose what your ROI is, period. No benchmarks, no, no nothing. So my sales guy [00:07:00] said, you know, hey, by completing these two documents, 
 Thomas Coleman: you know, in 
 Thomas Coleman: automated fashion, we can save the agency a hundred million dollars.
 Thomas Coleman: Absolutely ridiculous. But the agency had no way to validate. CFO Shop has the skills to partner with these other organizations to really improve what they do by bringing what we can provide and what we already do on the traditional CFO activities. And that's a way to get invited into the conversation, which allows you to.
 Thomas Coleman: Have more influence as a strategic advisor. 
Sarah Cunningham: That's, there's a lot of good stuff in the, oh, lemme try that 
Sarah Cunningham: again. Um, there's a lot of great stuff there. And I think one of the things, kind of going back to basics as CFOs, we are a multihyphenate. We really need to be thinking about wearing all of the hats at once.
Sarah Cunningham: We need to be thinking about risk and risk management. We wanna mitigate risk, but we can't bring risk down to zero because then we can't do anything about the mission and then we failed. [00:08:00] If we wanna make sure that we've got data and that we've got data to inform decisions, but we need to be able to make sure we're collecting the right data.
Sarah Cunningham: We're not collecting too much, we're not doing so in a way that impairs privacy is insecure. We wanna keep those two things up. We also wanna be thinking about what is the burden internally on our internal customers that need that data for other purposes. What is the burden on the recipients and subrecipients for those systems?
Sarah Cunningham: Um, kind of like what the, the earlier, um, panel was talking about, you know, what are some of the creative ways that we can, from our vantage point, because we see where all the dollars go, which means we get to see all the operations, we get to see the program dollars, the missions. We're also the ones who are usually facilitating the audit in places where you find all the problems.
Sarah Cunningham: And so how are the ways we can do creatively, we can't do that as CFOs without really engaging across disciplines, across the organization and across the entire [00:09:00] value chain to understand the customer experience with a very broad definition of customer and client. So kind of thinking through how do you balance them?
Sarah Cunningham: You need to kind of wear all the hats at once, and I would really encourage those of you who are working with CFOs, being able to put the problem. Where there's a technology solution in terms of what is the business problem, what is the potential for being able to solve a pain point? What is the potential for being able to deliver something new or, you know, get rid of millions of dollars and millions of dollars of costs and people that are trying to do workarounds manually for legacy systems.
Sarah Cunningham: Being able to put those technology solutions in terms of people, and starting with human-centric design means A CFO really needs to be a people person, not just an accountant anymore. 
 Steven Boberski: That, that's, that's kind of where I was going. I mean, you, you have so much reach and so much visibility. I think, you know, we don't [00:10:00] all think of that role traditionally in that view.
 Steven Boberski: Right. You know, it's, it's not just procurement dollars and I'm sure the procurement process, it's exceptionally fun as a CFO as well. Um, but you know, we'll talk a little bit about the professional side of it first. So you have to balance risk and budget constraints. Mandates, federal mandates that usually come without any dollars attached.
 Steven Boberski: Right. And then technology is expanding far beyond a, a piece, far beyond anybody expected. AI alone, we just, we spend all day talking. We will spend all the day talking about AI today. Um, uh, and, but for sure, uh, what are some, how do you qualify success when you trying to tackle the traditional role of financial management against this landscape of it that's just booking it?
 Steven Boberski: I mean, what, what, how would you, what's best practice or how would you define success? 
 Steven Boberski: We go right down 
 Steven Boberski: the road. 
Clarence Crawford: One of the things I would just say is, I'm gonna step back a little bit and say that one of the roles of the, of the CFO is to be proactive. You can't just sit there and wait [00:11:00] for unfunded mandates to arrive.
Clarence Crawford: You need to actively engage with OMB. And the hill in advance. And as you build these relationships, my experience is sometimes some of these things that you receive would've otherwise, uh, gotten as an unfunded mandate. You can head that off with conversations. So building strong relationships with OMB and in particular on the Hill with the House and Senate, your House and Senate, um, appropriation subcommittee, staff.
Clarence Crawford: Democrat and Republican, majority and minority, being able to have a relationship with them to be able to talk to them. Because sometimes what you'll see is some of these things that show up as an unfunded mandate are things that the hill has been telegraphing for a while. If you, if you know where to look, look at what's called the report language.
Clarence Crawford: The report language tells you what they [00:12:00] think. So being able to understand that and perhaps head some of those issues off, because once you get it as a mandate, you're stuck with it. But if you can sort of deflect it or help shape it, you're in a much better position. 
 Thomas Coleman: No, I think those are excellent points.
 Thomas Coleman: I kind of want to take this question in two parts. First, addressing unfunded mandates and what A CFO can do in that respect. I think one of the things we can do to stay prepared is to think strategically about organizational capabilities and assets. This goes again to how the CFO's role is unique as opposed to other organizations, is that we kind of look, are looking across the enterprise.
 Thomas Coleman: We know where modernization is happening, where there are potential needs, and so if we can think strategically about investments and how do we take something, you know, that is a really positive way of. Let's say doing application intake in one part of the organization for the public and federate that into other [00:13:00] areas and always be thinking about what is that baseline level of technology that's gonna help us be agile and responsive.
 Thomas Coleman: You know, we have that insight and we have that capability and it really, you know, dovetails with a lot of what we're seeing in this administration around procurement and, you know, using economies of scale to negotiate better deals. And can we kind of facilitate that within our organization in terms of what success looks like for the CFO um, role?
 Thomas Coleman: You know, I think it's a lot easier to define what failure is. You know, there are the things that can go wrong that we know, like not, not passing an audit, having a negative program audit, you know, payment integrity issues, reputational risk. So, so there's really two answers I have to that. One, try really hard not to fail.
 Thomas Coleman: Um, and the second, you know, leave. With positive, sustainable change and sustainable is really, you know, the key there is, you know, what can you do to move, uh, your agency [00:14:00] forward? And that's different in every single situation. But I think the fundamental key to that, which is the key also to not failing, is to build a strong team and bringing this back to technology, bringing it back to cx.
 Thomas Coleman: I think it's having a team that is not only motivated, high performing, but also understands and is comfortable with change in technology. And the way to do that is to embrace change in technology. Uh, a couple years ago I was talking to a CFO who wanted to improve their acquisition function, and they were asking me, who do you know in the industry that we could bring in that's an innovator?
 Thomas Coleman: It's like, I have a list of eight names. Um, the problem is, is what can you do to attract them? What can you do to retain them? And it's a chicken in the egg. You have to be innovative. So if you're running old technologies and you have to think about your teams as customers too, you know, and you're trying to recruit those people who really are a technology competent and b, motivated by change aren't going to wanna [00:15:00] work at a place that's working 20 years in the past.
 Thomas Coleman: So it's really kind of understanding that investment is critical to kind of maintaining that strong team, which is then going to be driving change in the future. 
Sarah Cunningham: So I love this question. Um, 'cause there's so many right answers, right? Um, and as a former budgeter, I mean, I was at OMB, so I've gotta answer with, you know, what's the definition of success?
Sarah Cunningham: It depends, it's our favorite answer when we're at OMB. It's kind of thinking, what, what, what is it we're trying to solve for? Am I solving for X or is it a, a bigger theorem that I'm trying to pull out? Um, but at the end of the day, I think success from the CFO's perspective is cost effective, efficient delivery on the mission.
Sarah Cunningham: That's that. It's really that simple. Um, it's out. I mean, in practice and actual application, definitely not that simple. We're navigating complexity. We're trying to figure out how to balance all of these different constraints. [00:16:00] And if you can reframe when you get an unfunded mandate, when you get something like that to Clarence's earlier point, well what is it that they're worried about?
Sarah Cunningham: What is that thing that is success and be able to build those relationships and engage with folks to understand, well, what does success look like? It sometimes can open up a very creative solution where you can say, Hey, I might be able to solve this complex problem by bringing a couple of other offices together, and instead of looking at an unfunded mandate or a one-off as a one-off, how does this fit in the bigger system?
Sarah Cunningham: Is there something that I can do to partner with the university? Is there something that I can do to really go out to the customers who are going to the kill and saying, Hey, I really hate how this program is working. Is this taking us forever? It's clunky. We don't have the money to do all of fill all of these different things out.
Sarah Cunningham: Going out and getting some of that information from an evidence perspective and being able to use that in a story, [00:17:00] that's one of the critical things from a CFO's perspective, is being able to engage and help with the storytelling. We don't have to be the storytellers ourselves, but if we understand what the issue is and we can bring the right people together, we can tell the story of, Hey, here's what's possible.
Sarah Cunningham: Here's what we can do to solve your root cause and actually make it better, a better program for everybody. Here's what we can do to save millions of dollars in these legacy systems to attract people who really wanna innovate and make change who are technology savvy. Because we've got those types of things in the workplace.
Sarah Cunningham: We get to use copilot, we get to use, um, all sorts of cool AI tools to do less work that is drudgery and kind of like pointing is A to A, B2B, and kind of like more of the manual part of audit compliance and things like that. And we can automate those things so we can ask better questions of how well is the money getting to where it needs to go, what are the impacts of these funding?
Sarah Cunningham: But being able to do [00:18:00] that storytelling and sometimes breaking it down, not just to here's the huge vision, but what are some of the quick wins. What are something that we can do to show progress towards that bigger goal, towards that bigger story? What's one chapter that we can tell? And getting the data from all of our partners, the CIO shops, the program offices, all of the stakeholders to be able to make it compelling.
Sarah Cunningham: That's really what success is at the end of the day. 
Clarence Crawford: Just want to add one other thing. You know where the federal government right now is we are going through a significant shift in, in workforce. There's tremendous risk associated with that because typically when an administration or the Congress cuts workforce, they rarely ever cut scope or mission.
Clarence Crawford: So as the federal government now is trying to achieve sort of a new steady state. [00:19:00] There is tremendous risk. So again, as you look at AI and AI tools, how can you help agents? If I were a CFO in the federal government, now my concerns would be how do we maintain mission in this incredibly, uh, um, changing environment?
Clarence Crawford: How do we make sure that we leverage technology because it's gonna be, I think it's gonna be easier for agencies to get money for technology than for hiring back people. So how do you then leverage that to help over this next two to three years? It's gonna take a while to sort of reach this new steady state, and during this process, then there's a much higher risk of an inadvertent mission failure if you don't understand what's going on.
 Steven Boberski: Um, yeah, I mean the, the role's changing, right? So, you know, [00:20:00] Genesis, we, you know, we, we'd say we're a experience orchestration company, right? So we have AI across the board at every touch point, right? We're doing knowledge management enhancement, all those kind of things. So, but we're talking about augmenting staff as well as leveling them up, right?
 Steven Boberski: Mm-hmm. But, um, this is a customer experience conference. So we're gonna, we're we're gonna talk about customer experience, right? The role of CFO, uh, and how it, how do you think it impacts the, the mission and, and customer experience? It was a mandate from the previous administration. It was not one that was countermanded, so it is still technically in place, and I have yet to run into an agency that says we would not like to improve our customer experience.
 Steven Boberski: So I think it's always been an initiative. So you have an opportunity to make it a priority, right? So what do you think the CFO's role is, particularly in customer experience? How can you help it be successful? Where we're, where can it fail if you're not involved? Uh, and, and what advice do you have to, you know, to get us involved with the C FFO shop?
 Steven Boberski: Okay. 
 Thomas Coleman: All right, I'll, I'll take a first stab at it. Um, I think there are a couple of ways. Um, one, and, and in my experience, portfolios from agency to [00:21:00] agency for what it falls under the CFO shop differ. But a lot of times, CFO does have a role, whether it's in procurement, whether it's in managing grant or loan programs.
 Thomas Coleman: They have a direct role in interacting with the public. So that's kinda, you know, step one is, you know, look to see where your public interactions are in the conventional sense and where there's opportunity not only to improve your efficiency through. Customer experience improvements, which again, is, is something that I think is the greatest benefit, but also kind of the public perceptions of your program, which kind of in a, a second or third degree manner, really kind of long-term dictate your funding.
 Thomas Coleman: If your program is popular, you're likely to, you know, get more congressional support down the road. So make it something that people enjoy engaging with instead of a point of frustration. I think another area is, you know, the CFO, um, owns. Financial data across the organization, and we are mandated by law to publish that data in, you [00:22:00] know, annual reports or sometimes, you know, going beyond that with dashboards to help the public understand how money's being spent.
 Thomas Coleman: I think that again feeds into, you know, the benefits that flow from public perception. You know, if you provide transparency into what you're doing, um, not only is that I think the right thing to do from a public service perspective, but it also can have benefits for the agency and you can only really get to that point where the average citizen can interact with that when you're using things that mirror what they experience in their everyday lives working with private companies.
 Thomas Coleman: Interactive dashboards are like table stakes at this point. No one's going to, you know, sift through except for maybe the people on the stage and a few others. You know, 200 page PDF reports to find, find answers.
Sarah Cunningham: So I think kind of bringing it to a few concrete examples, COVID taught us a lot. You know, there's a lot of great [00:23:00] examples of what the CFO's role in both success and um, fails. Um, were through the COVID experience. I was a local government, CFO when COVID broke out, and my experience with one of the first CARES Act programs, a coronavirus relief fund, at first it was like, thank God we're getting money that we can use to help do address some of the most critical needs of our community.
Sarah Cunningham: We were having a hard time getting enough, um, PPP or basically, you know, masks and other things for our first responders. We're having a really hard time making sure we had enough ventilators in case people got really sick through our public health department. We had a lot of critical, critical needs, and we were like, this money is great, it's flexible, it's wonderful.
Sarah Cunningham: We can't wait to get it. And this, I don't blame on the, entirely on the CFOs. This is something where, you know, engaging with Congress and making sure that there is clear lines of understanding of what you know, be careful what you wish for. Um, they wanted to make sure that the money [00:24:00] was fully flexible and could be applied to a lot of different needs, and they gave it to us upfront.
Sarah Cunningham: There were no program guidance. They then issued program guidance and FAQs through treasury. That kept changing over time. Sure. And right. And so I'm trying to build a process and hey, here's what we need to be able to use this money quickly and well to our greatest needs in the county. And there was a lot of flack as a customer, as a recipient, it was really difficult to be able to engage with my board of county commissioners, with the county manager, with all of the different,
Sarah Cunningham: I'm not sure that, oh, 
Sarah Cunningham: maybe it was because I mentioned the county manager. She was very, she's, she's still listening, right. Um, see, very difficult. But you know, when, when I'm trying to say, Hey, we need some internal controls, we need some data. We need to invest a little bit so we can have a system to track these [00:25:00] funds and see how they were applied, because we know we're gonna need to do reporting.
Sarah Cunningham: And they're all asking me, well, treasury didn't say you needed to do any of this. Why are you doing it? And then two years later, I'm on the hook to explain all of this to an auditor. Yeah, it, it was very, very difficult. It actually was difficult, not just in the moment, but in the long term, because without that data, without being able to say, here's how we spent it, it's a matter of public trust.
Sarah Cunningham: You know, people question, well, how did you use those funds? Where did they go? How did you, how do we know that they were used for, for good things and for the right things? What were their trade offs? But because we hadn't invested that money up front, we didn't have that clear guidance or mandate to do so it was really, really difficult.
Sarah Cunningham: On the other side, you saw later in COVID when folks started realizing, yeah, we probably need a little bit of program guidance and internal controls before the money goes out the door. Um, that is something I credit a lot of the CFO shops for engaging with Congress to say, yeah, you don't want fraud. We need to do a little more careful job, [00:26:00] making sure the funding goes out to the right people on the right time for the right purpose.
Sarah Cunningham: Um, on the backend, we saw a lot of great collaborations. Uh, I work with, uh, OCA off of ca, office of Capital Access at Treasury, previously Office of Recovery programs, and they built engagement teams that included the financial folks, included the program folks, and included the recipients with that type of a feedback loop.
Sarah Cunningham: They were able to say for one program in particular, the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, the money wasn't getting out the door. They pushed the money out quickly, but they couldn't find renters that. They just couldn't figure out how to find the landlords or renters because the people that received the money didn't have those connections.
Sarah Cunningham: So they were able to create that feedback loop, get that information up through the CFO's office and say, great, here's how we're gonna restructure the program. It was a full collaboration. They ended up restructuring that program three times over, [00:27:00] but because of that restructuring, over 88% of those funds went to people that were very low income or low income, ensured that families were able to stay in their houses when they didn't have access to their jobs, when they couldn't do their day to day.
Sarah Cunningham: And that was, I think, a profound example of the role the CFOs can have in their success. Because the first sign that things weren't going out the door is CFOs looking at the the funding reports. And we were seeing the funds that were there, but we weren't getting any reports that said, Hey, the dollars have been dispersed.
Sarah Cunningham: And so really having those collaborative relationships, A CFO can play a big, big role in facilitating change, kind of feel like the F and CFO could be for facilitating as well as financial 
Clarence Crawford: in one of my roles as the CFO and Chief Administrative Officer for U-S-P-T-O fee funded agency. So it is funded by the fees [00:28:00] paid by patent and trademark applicants.
Clarence Crawford: Uh, I was there. We as arrived with the new legislation to make PTO The, uh, performance based organization, uh, played a key role in standing up two advisory committees, a patent advisory committee, and a trademark advisory committee. It started out helping stand up these committees, but then it was then finance, but then it quickly turned to mission.
Clarence Crawford: Yeah, because what they, the, the two committees liked about the role of the CFO was that we were honest brokers. So they would come to us if they had questions about the patent process. Why is that happening? We've talked to patents, here's a patent that's telling us. So we were part of that, being able to explain that or, or trademark.
Clarence Crawford: So we, in that role, I had a direct and, um, [00:29:00] uh, complete, uh, access and engagement with customers. Customers would come to us for information. It was more like, it was more like A-A-C-F-O in a private sector organization dealing with stockholders. They came to us for the same kinds of information, what's going on, and then also knowing what their concerns and issues were.
Clarence Crawford: It allowed me then, as we were talking internally about. Doing this or that, be able to raise the questions about how does that impact what the trademark community is saying? How does that impact the concerns of the patent community? 
 Steven Boberski: I mean, that's all direct to the customer, right? Yes. You know, it's not just process.
 Steven Boberski: You guys are touching bodies, which is amazing, right? Um, so artificial intelligence gotta talk about it, right? It's the latest must have. We, there's clearly advantages to I technology, and you have to do it with guardrails. We've all, we talked about this in the panel before, we're [00:30:00] gonna talk about it all day, but how do you guys, you guys control the money, you get whatever you want, right?
 Steven Boberski: So how do you make sure that you get to take advantage of these tools as a CFO, as a shop, right? Is it the college children, you don't have any shoes or, you know, are too busy feeding everybody else. You don't get to eat. How do you make sure you guys get to play and participate to leverage these tools and, and what's the best practice?
 Steven Boberski: Maybe make sure you get engaged that way. Like how do you, how do you get to take advantage? 
Sarah Cunningham: I can start on this. 
Sarah Cunningham: There we go. I can start on this one. Um, I like the cobbler shoes. I think my friend Tina Kim, she's a deputy con comptroller for the State of New York Office of Accountability, and she calls it the Theory of the Boring.
Sarah Cunningham: It is true, and it's not just a theory of a boring, this is something where we as CFOs sometimes do it to ourselves. We're so focused on thinking about what's the most cost effective way to do this. How can I stretch my limited dollars as far as I can, and how can we make sure as much money as possible is going towards the mission that sometimes, you know, it, it can [00:31:00] be a blind spot.
Sarah Cunningham: I'll just leave it at that. And so what a best practice is, and what I've seen successful is in navigating the complexity, thinking about the problems and the playing points from a more holistic perspective, not just like, Hey, what is it that I, I have this huge financial reporting issue, but is there a way to bundle that problem with a customer experience?
Sarah Cunningham: If I'm not getting data from my recipients that shows that they were spending the money on a good use, is there an opportunity here to say, Hey, let's make it easier on those end users. Let's say maybe put up a reporting portal and some data standards so that they don't have to spend a lot of money creating their own systems, their own responses, but giving them an easy button to be able to upload the data that I need to be able to show compliance and to be able to make sure the money's going where it needs to go, but also being able to allow the program office insight [00:32:00] into how that money is being spent and capturing that data in a way that can be used as a base of evidence to drive continuous improvement and bigger policy or program changes across the program over time.
Sarah Cunningham: So thinking about things more holistically like that, you know, just imagine a world, if we could have an, I'm a big fan of blockchain. I don't know if anybody is interested. We do have a blockchain working group here for ACT iac, you know, but imagine a world, and I'm not talking for crypto, but if we could use distributed ledger technology to have one source of truth and be able for grantees to say, Hey, upload the information here directly to the blockchain.
Sarah Cunningham: Being able to embed applications, including AI that do risk assessments and validate that information. And then you've got one place where auditors can access the same documents, the grantees can, any of their oversight entities can, the CFO can just making and is secure and in a privacy supporting way.
Sarah Cunningham: There's all sorts of [00:33:00] options. If we can just kind of take a step back and think about the problems as a holistic system as opposed to one-offs, 
 Thomas Coleman: I think. Regardless what office you're in, CFO, you know, program, um, hr, et cetera. If you are not as a leader, actively encouraging your organization to be engaged with the market on technology, you are failing.
 Thomas Coleman: And I think in government specifically, and, and stuns me that this has been the case, you know, for, for my entire career. There are a lot of bad procurement myths in agencies that you cannot do market research and, you know, step one, you know, as CFO. It's like if that exists, you need to kind of, from an executive perspective, clarify that very quickly and encourage your teams to get out there in the market and just understand what exists, whether you have money for it or not, you know, at the time where you're buying it, you're already too late.
 Thomas Coleman: So at least having a function [00:34:00] within your office that understands the relevant technology is absolutely critical. Um, I think you. Per some of my earlier comments, CFO office has an advantage, you know, with that organizational perspective of understanding, you know, where the assets in an agency lie and, you know, there's opportunities to, you know, expand that potentially to your area for a cheaper cost than reprocuring it yourself or even getting your teams involved in just understanding what that is.
 Thomas Coleman: I think there's a role for the CFO office as a negotiator, um, you know, and, and not just kind of with the economies of scale, but also with, uh, prototyping, um, a bit, you know, experimenting with technologies. I think, you know, especially with what we're seeing in this administration, you know, with, you know, uh.
 Thomas Coleman: Edicts to cut cost. You know, you can work with industry and I think a lot of industry partners that I've seen have started to kind of [00:35:00] understand the importance of coming up with creative mechanisms for back loading, cost of some prototyping, of sharing the risk with government. And if you can kind of articulate that and understand what those structures are and work with industry, there's real opportunities if you come from that, you know, technology forward perspective, but also, you know, with, with some negotiation, um, leverage as well to kind of, uh, pursue that.
 Thomas Coleman: I think the last thing that CFO offices are uniquely, uh, positioned to do, and you know, this. From agency to agency, there's some variance with how, how far you can lean into this is, you know, you're responsible for reporting the risks and the state of the agency. And I remember, you know, when I came in the CFO, you know, I came into an agency that was running a four trans system that had no digitized records, um, from our inception in 1973.
 Thomas Coleman: And we had a level budget despite being non appropriated and essentially blank [00:36:00] check authority. We had a level budget for 15 years. 
 Steven Boberski: Were you issued a ts 80 when you got in the door? Just like in oh, radio 
 Steven Boberski: Shack 
 Steven Boberski: right up that 
 Thomas Coleman: there was literally fire code issues with our file room. Um. And one of the first things I did was sat down with the auditor.
 Thomas Coleman: You do the, you know, we had an external audit like a lot of agencies do, and you know, you do that kind of entrance conference, the CFO and I slid them over a couple files and say, here, here's all of our problems. Light us up. Um, and, you know, they seemed really confused and, you know, I explained it to, you know, my boss, uh, deputy assistant secretary of our treasury, you know, if for those of you seen in Glorious Bastard, I'm like, yeah, I've been chewed out before.
 Thomas Coleman: Like, send me wherever I need to go, but I'm getting budget to fix this. And you know, we did get a 50% increase in our budget because it was long overdue through o and b apportionment and having that courage and understanding how to use in a responsible way. You know, depending on your situations, the ability to kind of [00:37:00] dictate risk management, what you put out there and saying the bad stuff and not just hiding.
 Thomas Coleman: It really can facilitate not just for your office, but you know, the overall agency, what you're able to do. Um, from a modernization perspective. 
 Thomas Coleman: I'll 
Clarence Crawford: just add that as a practical matter. We've talked about the CFO being involved in strategy and advising. You can't do strategy and advising if all of your people are managing spreadsheets.
Clarence Crawford: That's right. So part of the challenge with the CFO and, and why I think they'll move in this area is that you have to be able to create value and managing spreadsheets is not value. So the degree to which you can begin to free up your staff to focus on [00:38:00] analysis, to help analyze data to be a strategic business partner is contingent upon getting as much of the, of the manual routine kinds of things that have taken up so much time in a CFO shop using AI and other tools like that to free up that, that time so that you have the, the time and, and the focus to be that strategic advisor.
Sarah Cunningham: So, oh, 
 Steven Boberski: oh, go ahead. Do you wanna add, 
Sarah Cunningham: just wanna build a little bit on what was said. I can't agree more. And I think that's one of the things too. One of the, the consequences of taking this approach, one of the consequences of modernization in a good way is that it helps break down the silos that makes things so hard.
Sarah Cunningham: It's really kind of not just thinking about data as a strategic asset within each shop, but data is a strategic [00:39:00] asset for the enterprise. 
Speaker 14: Yes. 
Sarah Cunningham: It opens up so many different possibilities. And also, like one of our big problems when I was at HUD and at the county, and a lot of the people that I work with now and at OMB, is that sometimes we were doing data collections and workarounds and we just kept adding.
Sarah Cunningham: We just kept adding data, new data collections, because we couldn't make the stuff that we were getting from the original work. And now we've got Franken data. You know, it's a big monster that's kind of got its own life running around the agency and taking up all of our server spaces and our cloud and we may not need or use a lot of it.
Sarah Cunningham: So being able to find that value by collaboration, by saying what's really important? What are those business questions and business problems we're trying to solve? Being able to start, start from a human-centric design where you're thinking about what is the program mission, what is it trying to do, who is it working with?
Sarah Cunningham: What are the needs all up and down that value chain? And then being able to put those into, here's [00:40:00] what the vision is and here are the incremental steps that we can be taking for small, quick wins towards that goal. 'cause the other thing that's happened in a lot of CFO shops and how does one of 'em, we've had a lot of big failures.
Sarah Cunningham: 'cause we tried to start eating the elephant in a one sandwich. Not that I, I don't actually support eating the elephants. I apologize. It's a really bad metaphor. But, you know, we were trying to boil the ocean, so to speak. We're trying to do one whole, like complete whole financial transformation all at once.
Sarah Cunningham: Big old project. And how many of those do we have frontline experience regardless of where we sit in an agency or from a public private sector supporting company, seen 'em fail. So it's about trying to figure out how can we take those quick wins and make incremental progress towards that vision of less silos and more intelligent data is a strategic asset.
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 Steven Boberski: I I would like we have a little time here, so before we get to questions, I wanna add one more thing. So I like the procurement myth concept, right? So, uh, if anybody here knows Sariah choa, um, you know, she's a big procurement wonk and, uh, I was having lunch with her one day.
 Steven Boberski: She said her favorite question to ask when she she's in class is, I'll give anybody $500 if you can show me where in the far it says you can't talk to industry when there's a procurement on the street, right? Doesn't exist. There is no such thing. If you talk to industry and you say something you shouldn't, you [00:42:00] have to publish.
 Steven Boberski: Don't have to say where you publish. There's, there's a way to handle this, right? But industry, we'd love to get to you guys when there's something just to hear more, you know, not the q and a doesn't work, right? But, so, so let's just talk real quick about everybody else that gets up here. 
 Steven Boberski: We're all industry, 
 Steven Boberski: almost all industry today, unfortunately.
 Steven Boberski: But, but we, we would like to know what you would like to see from us to help. You know, we wanna sell stuff to you, right? You wanna buy stuff from us. How can we make it easier for the cfo? We know how to make it easier for the CIO he tells us every day. We know how to make it for the CISO as well. But what about the C?
 Steven Boberski: You know, it's gotta get to you. What can we do to make it easier for you and make, and, you know, better experience across the board. 
 Thomas Coleman: Be creative about different pricing models, invest in thinking about how you can deliver in different structures. Um, some agencies it's more effective to do outcome-based pricing, and sometimes that can be very difficult to figure out like, what is a price per application process per, you know, use of a website for, for a specific service.
 Thomas Coleman: Think about [00:43:00] how you can make economic models with backloading acceptable from a risk perspective. I think the number one thing that I've seen, you know, now that I'm a member of industry, but also on the government side, is just this inflexible model when you're engaging even from the market research perspective.
 Thomas Coleman: And that question comes up, you know, okay, like, how can we buy this? And there's like, well, this is how we sell it. It's this much per year. Conversations die at that point. And so especially now where things are to, to put it lightly a little leaner, having someone in the room that can ideate with government on how to make it work for them is probably the number one biggest piece of advice I can give.
 Steven Boberski: Do you run a, I mean, how do you just, how do you overcome the far challenge? You know, there are a lot of contract contractual restrictions on what you can and can't do. How you buy, how to pay for something. There's always a way to get around it. But how do you deal with the contract officer that says, uh, absolutely not.
 Thomas Coleman: Um. You, you know, at a certain point you hit a [00:44:00] brick wall. Right? And that happens, and I think we've all experienced it where, you know, the program side, CFO or, or whoever's purchasing is like CO says, we can't talk. We can't talk. Um, you know, I happen to be a procurement attorney. So, you know, I'm able to kind of do some of those far sites and, you know, in the most friendly way possible, try and suggest, you know, there are ways to talk to us.
 Thomas Coleman: Sometimes that helps sometimes. You still hit the brick wall. I think the key is to, you know, not do the hard sale pressure where a program office feels like they might get in trouble, and the more you can be like, Hey, we've helped navigate this before, let's keep the conversation going. You know, look for a side door in to have those discussions.
 Thomas Coleman: I think it's all about creating comfort for who you're talking to, understanding that they probably don't know what the rules are and you know, they're gonna be very skittish maybe about those conversations. I 
 Steven Boberski: think the music's gonna start playing in the background. Do, do you wanna go write the questions or We let 'em [00:45:00] finish the 
Clarence Crawford: You can finish.
Clarence Crawford: Okay. And then, we'll, I'm just gonna take a little different perspective. There's a tremendous green field opportunity in public education. You're looking at half a trillion dollars a year in spend. They are struggling with not being able to hire enough teachers, and even if they could, they can't afford it.
Clarence Crawford: So looking at things that could be done to support teaching of students, things that could be done in terms of helping teachers with administration. There's tremendous opportunity. There's hardly anybody in that space and I, and for local governments, they're spending probably about half or more of their budgets [00:46:00] on education.
Clarence Crawford: So again, as you're looking at this and taking what you're learning, there's a green field out there in those states where I think they would be open to some real, uh, suggestions about how they could improve, deliver services to students and reduce administrative costs.
Sarah Cunningham: It is really hard to follow that up because that that is 
Sarah Cunningham: Yes, a hundred percent everything Clarence just said. Um, I wanted to build a little bit off of what Tom was saying though, in terms of how to make it easier for the CFO, how to make it easier for the agency. Do your homework. Read the appropriations.
Sarah Cunningham: Read the report language. Listen to the hearings, understand what questions folks on the hill have. Look at the president's budget. That tells you what our financial constraints are. That tells you the framework that we're operating in. [00:47:00] And to Tom's point, being able to say, be flexible. Be flexible, and help us navigate.
Sarah Cunningham: You can see what's enacted. You can see what all of those constraints are. Help us think through what are some of the ways that we can make that incremental progress. So we have that win. We have the story to tell that will help us invest in those improvements over the long run. 
Martha Dorris: Well, I want to thank this panel for me.
Martha Dorris: This didn't disappoint. I, I, I have a good friend that is a CFO. You gotta have thick skin to be CFOs too, because we're all trying to get money and explain what we're trying to do. And you guys are like, you have like radar on like sifting through the BS too. So I know that that, uh. You've given us a lot of great tips that, that are, um, important to all of us, including everybody doing their research and understanding the agency and the, the problems and meeting the mission.
Martha Dorris: And, and I think no thinking of [00:48:00] CFOs not as spreadsheet, you know, an analyst and thinking of them as in many cases, they're really running the overall strategy of the, of the agency. And, and I think it's an important role that we have not yet cracked the code on. So appreciate you all, you all coming and giving us your insights and giving us tips on how we can, you know, meet the CFOs in agencies.
Martha Dorris: So thank you. 
AUDIENCE: It was an awesome ad. It was an awesome.
Martha Dorris: So while the pa the panel is coming up, I just wanted to, um, give a little background on this. Um, as a community that focuses on customer experience and service [00:49:00] delivery, we've known for years the efficiency gains that you can, you can get from applying a customer focused, customer centric, um, philosophy.
Martha Dorris: So we've long known that we needed to engage the chief financial officers within agencies as you're creating your business cases and getting them to understand what customer experiences understand the efficiency gains. And so this is the first time that we've really brought together the CFO community with the customer experience and service, um, delivery community.
Martha Dorris: So I would like to introduce our moderator, um, who will be Steve Borsky, the private sector, CTO for Genesis 
 Steven Boberski: Public Sector. Yes. 
Martha Dorris: Tell me again. Public 
 Steven Boberski: sector. 
Martha Dorris: Public, what did I say? Private sector. Private sector. 
 Steven Boberski: I wish I was a private sector. CTO. That would be really cool. We have one of those, 
Martha Dorris: well, my notes say private sector, so it's not my fault.
Martha Dorris: Anyway, welcome to this panel and, [00:50:00] um, as, as you're listening to this, think about as agencies and, and industry, as you're helping your government clients, they need to start talking to their CFOs and getting them engaged in this conversation. So I'm thrilled to, to, uh, hear what you guys have to say. Thank you.
 Steven Boberski: On, by the way. Okay. I probably don't need a mic, but, um, we'll do some quick introductions. My name's Steve Oberski, as she said. I work for Genesis. We are a, um, an AI powered, uh, experience orchestration platform. Carter Magic Quadrant leader for C Cs. If you'd like to learn more about that, we got a booth in the back.
 Steven Boberski: Love to have chat with you. Um, and, uh, this just work right through the panel. This is great. 
Clarence Crawford: Hi, Clarence Crawford. I'm a retired, uh, federal CFO and I'm also, um, uh, adjunct professor at American University. 
 Thomas Coleman: Nice to be with you all today. I am Tom Coleman. I am the former, uh, CFO of Treasury's Federal Financing Bank, and look forward to having this discussion.[00:51:00] 
Sarah Cunningham: Good morning. I am Sarah Cunningham. I used to be Sarah Berg for those that are in federal creditee stuff. Uh, my background is I've been a govey for most of my career. I'm currently a partner with Summit, but I was the assistant Chief financial officer for budget at hud, acting in many different capacities over my time, getting into all sorts of cool things on the CFO side.
Sarah Cunningham: And I also spent three years as a local government, CFO, so kinda, uh, from the OMB side to the recipient side. Looking forward to today. 
 Steven Boberski: It is really exciting. Martha pointed out, uh, correctly that, you know, we really don't get an opportunity to put the CFOs up here. You know, you think customer experience, you get C-T-O-C-I-O cus CXOs customer experience, chief Knowledge officers.
 Steven Boberski: But the, the, the charter for the CFO and the federal government is, is not just financial, right? You have financial stewardship and, and management. You have the risk management, but you're also supposed to be a strategic advisor and, and a transformation architect. How do you balance those roles? Clarence?
Clarence Crawford: I think that one of the things that, as I talk to CFOs around, I [00:52:00] tell them that if the only thing you can do is talk about money, uh, you're being overpaid. Um, your job is in, in, in essence to improve and increase value. So being able to understand and being able to communicate that and being able to, and the CFO's uniquely positioned to be able to see across the enterprise and then be able to offer suggestions, uh, that others 
 Thomas Coleman: cannot do.
 Thomas Coleman: I would absolutely agree with what 
 Thomas Coleman: Clarence says. The way I think of it is kind of, there's like a Maslow's hierarchy of CFO needs, and at the bottom of that is financial audit. You need to pass one of those risk management, payment integrity, those are all really, really important. We could talk about that, but that's a different conference above that is continuing evolution.
 Thomas Coleman: And it's exactly, you know, as was mentioned, the role of strategic advisor. And so I think of those two words kind of as separate objectives [00:53:00] for a, uh, modern CFO from a strategy perspective. And, and this is exactly what Clarence mentioned, you know, most offices and agencies think about their money in one year terms.
 Thomas Coleman: And only in terms of their program, what the CFO can do, especially in the CX space. And I've got a recent example from A-C-F-O-I was talking to is, you know, if they have a system that's a legacy system, it's a, in this case it was a lending platform that the public had to interact with. They need to modernize it.
 Thomas Coleman: Well, there's not the budget, um, in the CFO, who's the product owner to modernize that. But on the other side, in a completely different office, there's a gigantic help desk contract. And that contract is huge because the system doesn't allow for self-service. The system is complicated. It doesn't have some of those automated data checks on applications that the prior panel talked about.
 Thomas Coleman: So A CFO can look across the organization and think in multi-year, how do I get from A to [00:54:00] B? And how do I do that in a way that I can advocate even with level resources, where to make cuts to get to a point where the agency is operating in a more efficient manner. And that's really the strategic role. I think the advisor role is also important.
 Thomas Coleman: You know, a lot of times, you know, it's easy for a CFO to say, I need to be involved in every decision. And then everyone rolls their eyes when you have to approve their procurement. But if you can provide something of value and from a CFO shop, what we do really well is data-driven decision making and help organizations when they're looking to make these purchases, think strategically about how do I get best value?
 Thomas Coleman: I remember about seven years ago when all these conferences had RPA instead instead of ai. And there were a lot of procurements in the RPA space. I was with a product company. We were competing for a lot of these, and a few of those said, you know, propose what your ROI is, period. No benchmarks, no, no nothing.
 Thomas Coleman: So my sales guy said, you know, hey, by completing these two documents, you know, [00:55:00] in automated fashion, we can save the agency a hundred million dollars. Absolutely ridiculous. But the agency had no way to validate. CFO Shop has the skills to partner with these other organizations to really improve what they do.
 Thomas Coleman: By bringing what we can provide and what we already do on the traditional CFO activities. And that's a way to get invited into the conversation, which allows you to have more influence as a strategic advisor. 
Sarah Cunningham: That's, there's a lot of good stuff in the, oh, lemme try that 
Sarah Cunningham: again. Um, there's a lot of great stuff there.
Sarah Cunningham: And I think one of the things, kind of going back to basics as CFOs, we are a multihyphenate. We really need to be thinking about wearing all of the hats at once. We need to be thinking about risk and risk management. We wanna mitigate risk, but we can't bring risk down to zero because then we can't do anything about the mission.
Sarah Cunningham: And then we failed. If we wanna make sure that we've got data and that we've got [00:56:00] data to inform decisions, but we need to be able to make sure we're collecting the right data. We're not collecting too much, we're not doing so in a way that. Impairs privacy is insecure. We wanna keep those two things up.
Sarah Cunningham: We also wanna be thinking about what is the burden internally on our internal customers that need that data for other purposes? What is the burden on the recipients and subrecipients for those systems? Um, kind of like what the, the earlier, um, panel was talking about, you know, what are some of the creative ways that we can from our vantage point, because we see where all the dollars go, which means we get to see all the operations.
Sarah Cunningham: We get to see the program dollars, the missions. We're also the ones who are usually facilitating the audit in places where you find all the problems. And so how are the ways we can do creatively, we can't do that as CFOs without really engaging across disciplines, across the organization and across the entire value chain to understand the customer experience with a very [00:57:00] broad definition of customer and client.
Sarah Cunningham: So kind of thinking through how do you balance them? You need to kind of wear all the hats at once, and I would really encourage those of you who are working with CFOs, being able to put the problem where there's a technology solution in terms of what is the business problem, what is the potential for being able to solve a pain point?
Sarah Cunningham: What is the potential for being able to deliver something new or you know. Get rid of millions of dollars and millions of dollars of costs and people that are trying to do workarounds manually for legacy systems. Being able to put those technology solutions in terms of people, and starting with human-centric design means A CFO really needs to be a people person, not just an accountant anymore.
 Steven Boberski: That, that's, that's kind of where I was going. I mean, you, you have so much reach and so much visibility. I think, you know, we don't all think of that role traditionally in that view. Right. You know, it's, it's not just [00:58:00] procurement dollars and I'm sure the procurement process, it's exceptionally fun as a CFO as well.
 Steven Boberski: Um, but you know, we'll talk a little bit about the traditional side of it first. So you have to balance risk and budget constraints with. Mandates, federal mandates that usually come without any dollars attached. Right. And then technology is expanding far beyond a, a piece, far beyond anybody expected. AI alone, we just, we spend all day talking.
 Steven Boberski: We will spend all the day talking about AI today. Um, uh, and, but for sure, uh, what are some, how do you qualify success when you trying to tackle the traditional role of financial management against this landscape of it that's just booking it? I mean, what, what, how would you, what's best practice or how would you define success?
 Steven Boberski: We 
 Steven Boberski: go right down the road. 
Clarence Crawford: One of the things I would just say is, I'm gonna step back a little bit and say that one of the roles of the, of the CFO is to be proactive. You can't just sit there and wait for unfunded mandates to arrive. [00:59:00] You need to actively engage with OMB. And the hill in advance. And as you build these relationships, my experience is sometimes some of these things that you receive would've otherwise, uh, gotten as an unfunded mandate.
Clarence Crawford: You can head that off with conversations. So building strong relationships with OMB and in particular on the Hill with the House and Senate, your House and Senate, um, appropriation subcommittee, staff, Democrat and Republican Majority and minority, being able to have a relationship with them to be able to talk to them.
Clarence Crawford: Because sometimes what you'll see is some of these things that show up as an unfunded mandate. Are things that the hill has been telegraphing for a while. If you, if you know where to look, look at what's called the report language. The report language tells you what they think. So being able to understand that and [01:00:00] perhaps head some of those issues off, because once you get it as a mandate, you're stuck with it.
Clarence Crawford: But if you can sort of deflect it or help shape it, you're in a much better position. 
 Thomas Coleman: No, I think those are excellent points. I kind of want to take this question in two parts. First, addressing unfunded mandates and what A CFO can do in that respect. I think one of the things we can do to stay prepared is to think strategically about organizational capabilities and assets.
 Thomas Coleman: This goes again to how the CFO's role is unique as opposed to other organizations, is that we kind of look, are looking across the enterprise. We know where modernization is happening, where there are potential needs, and so if we can think strategically about investments and how do we take something, you know, that is a really positive way of.
 Thomas Coleman: Let's say doing application intake in one part of the organization for the public and federate that into other areas and always be thinking about what is that [01:01:00] baseline level of technology that's gonna help us be agile and responsive. You know, we have that insight and we have that capability and it really, you know, dovetails with a lot of what we're seeing in this administration around procurement and, you know, using economies of scale to negotiate better deals.
 Thomas Coleman: And can we kind of facilitate that within our organization in terms of what success looks like for the CFO um, role? You know, I think it's a lot easier to define what failure is. You know, there are the things that can go wrong that we know, like not, not passing an audit, having a negative program audit, you know, payment integrity issues, reputational risk.
 Thomas Coleman: So, so there's really two answers I have to that. One, try really hard not to fail. Um, and the second, you know, leave. With positive, sustainable change and sustainable is really, you know, the key there is, you know, what can you do to move, uh, your agency forward? And that's different in every single situation.
 Thomas Coleman: But [01:02:00] I think the fundamental key to that, which is the key also to not failing, is to build a strong t. And bringing this back to technology, bringing it back to cx, I think it's having a team that is not only motivated, high performing, but also understands and is comfortable with change in technology. And the way to do that is to embrace change in technology.
 Thomas Coleman: Uh, a couple years ago I was talking to a CFO who wanted to improve their acquisition function, and they were asking me, who do you know in the industry that we could bring in that's an innovator? It's like, I have a list of eight names. Um, the problem is, is what can you do to attract them? What can you do to retain them?
 Thomas Coleman: And it's a chicken and the egg. You have to be innovative. So if you're running old technologies and you have to think about your teams as customers too, you know, and you're trying to recruit those people who really are a technology competent, and b, motivated by change. Aren't going to wanna work at a place that's working 20 years in the [01:03:00] past.
 Thomas Coleman: So it's really kind of understanding that investment is critical to kind of maintaining that strong team, which is then going to be driving change in the future. 
Sarah Cunningham: So I love this question. Um, 'cause there's so many right answers, right? Um, and as a former budgeter, I mean, I was at OMB so I've gotta answer with, you know, what's the definition of success?
Sarah Cunningham: It depends, it's our favorite answer when we're at OMB is kind of thinking, what, what, what is it we're trying to solve for? Am I solving for X or is it a, a bigger theorem that I'm trying to pull out? Um, but at the end of the day, I think success from the CFO's perspective is cost effective, efficient delivery on the mission.
Sarah Cunningham: That's, that, it's really that simple. Um, it's out. I mean, in practice, an actual application, definitely not that simple. We're navigating complexity. We're trying to figure out how to balance all of these different constraints. And if you can reframe when you get an [01:04:00] unfunded mandate, when you get something like that to Clarence's earlier point, well, what is it that they're worried about?
Sarah Cunningham: What is that thing that is success? And be able to build those relationships and engage with folks to understand, well, what does success look like? It sometimes can open up a very creative solution where you can say, Hey, I might be able to solve this complex problem by bringing a couple of other offices together.
Sarah Cunningham: And instead of looking at an unfunded mandate or a one-off as a one-off, how does this fit in the bigger system? Is there something that I can do to partner with the university? Is there something that I can do to really go out to the customers who are going to the kill and saying, Hey, I really hate how this program is working.
Sarah Cunningham: This is taking us forever. It's clunky. We don't have the money to do all of, fill all of these different things out. Going out and getting some of that information from an evidence perspective and being able to use that in a story, that's one of the critical things from a CFO's perspective, is being [01:05:00] able to engage and help with the storytelling.
Sarah Cunningham: We don't have to be the storytellers ourselves, but if we understand what the issue is and we can bring the right people together, we can tell the story of, Hey, here's what's. Here's what we can do to solve your root cause and actually make it better, a better program for everybody. Here's what we can do to save millions of dollars in these legacy systems to attract people who really wanna innovate and make change who are technology savvy.
Sarah Cunningham: Because we've got those types of things in the workplace. We get to use co-pilot, we get to use, um, all sorts of cool AI tools to do less work that is drudgery and kind of like pointing is A to a, B2B, and kind of like more of the manual part of audit compliance and things like that. And we can automate those things.
Sarah Cunningham: So we can ask better questions of how well is the money getting to where it needs to go, what are the impacts of these funding? But being able to do that storytelling and sometimes breaking it down, not just to here's the [01:06:00] huge vision, but what are some of the quick wins? What are something that we can do to show progress towards that bigger goal, towards that bigger story?
Sarah Cunningham: What's one chapter that we can tell? And getting the data from all of our partners, the CIO shops, the program offices, all of the stakeholders to be able to make it compelling. That's really what success is at the end of the day. 
Clarence Crawford: Okay. Just want to add one other thing. You know, we're the federal government right now is we are going through a significant shift in, in workforce.
Clarence Crawford: There's tremendous risk associated with that because typically when an administration or the Congress cuts workforce, they rarely ever cut scope or mission. So as the federal government now is trying to achieve sort of a new steady state, there is tremendous risk. So again, as you [01:07:00] look at AI and AI tools, how can you help?
Clarence Crawford: Agency if I were a CFO in the federal government, now my concerns would be how do we maintain mission in this incredibly, uh, uh, changing environment? How do we make sure that we leverage technology because it's gonna be, I think it's gonna be easier for agencies to get money for technology than for hiring back people.
Clarence Crawford: So how do you then leverage that to help over this next two to three years? It's gonna take a while to sort of reach this new steady state, and during this process, then there's a much higher risk of an inadvertent mission failure if you don't understand what's going on. 
 Steven Boberski: Um, yeah, I mean the, the role's changing, right?
 Steven Boberski: So, you know, Genesis, we, you know, we, we'd say we're a experience orchestration [01:08:00] company, right? So we have AI across the board at every touch point, right? We're doing knowledge management enhancement, all those kind of things. So, but we're talking about augmenting staff as well as leveling them up, right?
 Steven Boberski: Mm-hmm. But, um, this is a customer experience conference. So we're gonna, we're we're gonna talk about customer experience, right? The role of CFO, uh, and how it, how do you think it impacts the, the mission and, and customer experience? It was a mandate from the previous administration. It was not one that was countermanded, so it is still technically in place, and I have yet to run into an agency that says we would not like to improve our customer experience.
 Steven Boberski: So I think it's always been an initiative. So you have an opportunity to make it a priority, right? So what do you think the CFO's role is, particularly in customer experience? How can you help it be successful? Where we're, where can it fail if you're not involved? Uh, and, and what advice do you have to, you know, to get us involved with the CFO shop?
 Steven Boberski: Okay. 
 Thomas Coleman: All right, I'll, I'll take a first stab at it. Um, I think there are a couple of ways. Um, one, and, and in my experience, portfolios from agency to agency for what it falls under the CFO shop differ, but a [01:09:00] lot of times CFO does have a role, whether it's in procurement, whether it's in managing grant or loan programs.
 Thomas Coleman: They have a direct role in interacting with the public. So that's kinda, you know, step one is, you know, look to see where your public interactions are in the conventional sense and where there's opportunity not only to improve your efficiency through. Customer experience improvements, which again, is, is something that I think is the greatest benefit, but also kind of the public perceptions of your program, which kind of in a, a second or third degree manner, really kind of long-term dictate your funding.
 Thomas Coleman: If your program is popular, you're likely to, you know, get more congressional support down the road. So make it something that people enjoy engaging with instead of a point of frustration. I think another area is, you know, the CFO, um, owns. Financial data across the organization, and we are mandated by law to publish that data in, you know, annual reports or sometimes, you know, going beyond that [01:10:00] with dashboards to help the public understand how money's being spent.
 Thomas Coleman: I think that again feeds into, you know, the benefits that flow from public perception, you know, if you provide transparency into what you're doing, um, not only is that I think the right thing to do from a public service perspective, but it also can have benefits for the agency and you can only really get to that point where the average citizen can interact with that when you're using things that mirror what they experience in their everyday lives working with private companies.
 Thomas Coleman: Interactive dashboards are like table stakes at this point. No one's going to, you know, sift through except for maybe the people on the stage and a few others, you know, 200 page PDF reports to find, find answers.
Sarah Cunningham: So I think. W kind of bringing it to a few concrete examples. COVID taught us a lot. You know, there's a lot of great examples of what the CFO's role in both success [01:11:00] and um, fails. Um, were through the COVID experience. I was a local government, CFO when COVID broke out, and my experience with one of the first CARES Act programs, a coronavirus relief fund, at first it was like, thank God we're getting money that we can use to help do address some of the most critical needs of our community.
Sarah Cunningham: We were having a hard time getting enough, um, PPP or basically, you know, masks and other things for our first responders. We're having a really hard time making sure we had enough ventilators in case people got really sick. Through our public health department. We had a lot of critical, critical needs, and we were like, this money is great.
Sarah Cunningham: It's flexible, it's wonderful. We can't wait to get it. And this, I don't blame on the, entirely on the CFOs. This is something where, you know, engaging with Congress and making sure that there is clear lines of understanding of what you know, be careful what you wish for. Um, they wanted to make sure that the money was fully flexible and could be applied to a lot of different needs, [01:12:00] and they gave it to us upfront.
Sarah Cunningham: There were no program guidance. They then issued program guidance in FAQs through treasury. That kept changing over time. Sure. And right. And so I'm trying to build a process and hey, here's what we need to be able to use this money quickly and well to our greatest needs in the county. And there was a lot of flack as a customer, as a recipient, it was really difficult to be able to engage with my board of county commissioners, with the county manager with all the different,
Sarah Cunningham: not sure that, oh, 
Sarah Cunningham: maybe it was because I mentioned the county manager. She was very, she's, she's still listening, right? Um, see, very difficult. But you know, when, when I'm trying to say, Hey, we need some internal controls, we need some data. We need to invest a little bit so we can have a system to track these funds and see how they were applied, because we know we're gonna need to do [01:13:00] reporting.
Sarah Cunningham: And they're all asking me, well, treasury didn't say you needed to do any of this. Why are you doing it? And then two years later, I'm on the hook to explain all of this to an auditor. Yeah, it, it was very, very difficult. It actually was difficult, not just in the moment, but in the long term, because without that data, without being able to say, here's how we spent it, it's a matter of public trust.
Sarah Cunningham: You know, people question, well, how did you use those funds? Where did they go? How did you, how do we know that they were used for, for good things and for the right things? What were their trade offs? But because we hadn't invested that money up front, we didn't have that clear guidance or mandate to do so it was really, really difficult.
Sarah Cunningham: On the other side, you saw later in COVID when folks started realizing, yeah, we probably need a little bit of program guidance and internal controls before the money goes out the door. Um, that is something I credit a lot of the CFO shops for engaging with Congress to say, yeah, you don't want fraud. We need to do a little more careful job of making sure the funding goes out to the right people on the right time for [01:14:00] the right purpose.
Sarah Cunningham: Um, on the backend, we saw a lot of great collaborations. Uh, I work with, uh, OCA off of ca, office of Capital Access at Treasury, previously Office of Recovery programs, and they built engagement teams that included the financial folks, included the program folks, and included the recipients with that type of a feedback loop.
Sarah Cunningham: They were able to say for one program in particular, the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, the money wasn't getting out the door. They pushed the money out quickly, but they couldn't find renters that. They just couldn't figure out how to find the landlords or renters because the people that received the money didn't have those connections.
Sarah Cunningham: So they were able to create that feedback loop, get that information up through the CFO's office and say, great, here's how we're gonna restructure the program. It was a full collaboration. They ended up restructuring that program three times over, but because of that restructuring, over [01:15:00] 88% of those funds went to people that were very low income or low income, ensured that families were able to stay in their houses when they didn't have access to their jobs, when they couldn't do their day to day.
Sarah Cunningham: And that was, I think, a profound example of the role the CFOs can have in their success. Because the first sign that things weren't going out the door is CFOs looking at the the funding reports. And we were seeing the funds that were there, but we weren't getting any reports that said, Hey, the dollars have been dispersed.
Sarah Cunningham: And so really having those collaborative relationships, A CFO can play a big, big role in facilitating change, kind of feel like the F and CFO could be for facilitating as well as financial 
Clarence Crawford: in one of my roles as the CFO and Chief Administrative Officer for U-S-P-T-O fee funded agency. So it is funded by the fees paid by patent and trademark applicants.[01:16:00] 
Clarence Crawford: Uh, I was there. We as arrived with the new legislation to make PTO The, uh, performance based organization, uh, played a key role in standing up two advisory committees, a patent advisory committee, and a trademark advisory committee. It started out helping stand up these committees, but then it was then finance, but then it quickly turned to mission.
Clarence Crawford: Yeah, because what they, the, the two committees liked about the role of the CFO was that we were honest brokers. So they would come to us if they had questions about the patent process. Why is that happening? We've talked to patents, here's a patents that's telling us. So we were part of that, being able to explain that or, or trademark.
Clarence Crawford: So we, in that role, I had a direct and, um, uh, complete, uh, access and [01:17:00] engagement with customers. Customers would come to us for information. It was more like, it was more like A-A-C-F-O in a private sector organization dealing with stockholders. They came to us for the same kinds of information, what's going on, and then also knowing what their concerns and issues were.
Clarence Crawford: It allowed me then, as we were talking internally about. Doing this or that, be able to raise the questions about how does that impact what the trademark community is saying? How does that impact the concerns of the patent community? 
 Steven Boberski: I mean, that's all direct to the customer, right? You know, it's not just process.
 Steven Boberski: You guys are touching bodies, which is amazing, right? Um, so. Artificial intelligence gotta talk about it, right? It's the latest must have. We, there's clearly advantages to technology and you have to do with guardrails. We've all, we talked about this in the panel before, we're gonna talk about it all day, but how do you guys, you guys control the [01:18:00] money, you get whatever you want, right?
 Steven Boberski: So how do you make sure that you get to take advantage of these tools as a cfo, as a shop, right? You are, is it the college children? You don't have any shoes or, you know, are too busy feeding everybody else. You don't get to eat. How do you make sure you guys get to play and participate to leverage these tools and, and what's the best practice?
 Steven Boberski: Maybe make sure you get engaged in that way. Like how do you, how do you get to take advantage? 
Sarah Cunningham: I can start on this. Oh, 
Sarah Cunningham: there we go. I can start on this one. Um, I like the Cobbler shoes. I think my friend Tina Kim, she's a deputy con comptroller for the State of New York Office of Accountability, and she calls it the theory of the boring.
Sarah Cunningham: It is true, and it's not just a theory of a boring, this is something where we as CFOs sometimes do it to ourselves. We're so focused on thinking about what's the most cost effective way to do this. How can I stretch my limited dollars as far as I can, and how can we make sure as much money as possible is going towards the mission that sometimes, you know, it, it can be a blind spot.
Sarah Cunningham: I'll just leave it at that. And so [01:19:00] what a best practice is, and what I've seen successful is in navigating the complexity, thinking about the problems and the playing points from a more holistic perspective. Not just like, Hey, what is it that I, I have this huge financial reporting issue, but is there a way to bundle that problem with a customer experience?
Sarah Cunningham: If I'm not getting data from my recipients that shows that they were spending the money on a good use, is there an opportunity here? To say, Hey, let's make it easier on those end users. Let's say maybe put up a reporting portal and some data standards so that they don't have to spend a lot of money creating their own systems, their own responses, but giving them an easy button to be able to upload the data that I need to be able to show compliance and to be able to make sure the money's going where it needs to go, but also being able to allow the program office insight into how that money is being spent and capturing that data in a way that [01:20:00] can be used as a base of evidence to drive continuous improvement and bigger policy or program changes across the program over time.
Sarah Cunningham: Okay, so thinking about things more holistically like that, you know, just imagine a world, if we could have an, I'm a big fan of blockchain. I don't know if anybody is interested. We do have a blockchain working group here for ACT iac, you know, but imagine a world, and I'm not talking for crypto, but if we could use distributed ledger technology to have one source of truth and be able for grantees to say, Hey, upload the information here directly to the blockchain.
Sarah Cunningham: Being able to embed applications, including AI that do risk assessments and validate that information. And then you've got one place where auditors can access the same documents, the grantees can, any of their oversight entities can, the CFO can just making and is secure and in a privacy supporting way.
Sarah Cunningham: There's all sorts of options. If we can just kind of take a step back and think [01:21:00] about the problems as a holistic system as opposed to one-offs, 
 Thomas Coleman: I think. Regardless what office you're in, CFO, you know, program, um, hr, et cetera. If you are not as a leader, actively encouraging your organization to be engaged with the market on technology, you are failing.
 Thomas Coleman: And I think in government specifically, and, and stuns me that this has been the case, you know, for, for my entire career. There are a lot of bad procurement myths in agencies that you cannot do market research and, you know, step one, you know, as CFO. It's like if that exists, you need to kind of, from an executive perspective, clarify that very quickly and encourage your teams to get out there in the market and just understand what exists, whether you have money for it or not, you know, at the time where you're buying it, you're already too late.
 Thomas Coleman: So at least having a function within your office that understands the relevant technology [01:22:00] is absolutely critical. Um, I think you. Per some of my earlier comments, CFO office has an advantage, you know, with that organizational perspective of understanding, you know, where the assets in an agency lie and, you know, there's opportunities to, you know, expand that potentially to your area for a cheaper cost than reprocuring yourself or even getting your teams involved in just understanding what that is.
 Thomas Coleman: I think there's a role for the CFO office as a negotiator, um, you know, and, and not just kind of with the economies of scale, but also with, uh, prototyping, um, a bit, you know, experimenting with technologies. I think, you know, especially with what we're seeing in this administration, you know, with, you know, uh.
 Thomas Coleman: Edicts to cut cost. You know, you can work with industry and I think a lot of industry partners that I've seen have started to kind of understand the importance of coming up with creative [01:23:00] mechanisms for back loading, cost of some prototyping, of sharing the risk with government. And if you can kind of articulate that and understand what those structures are and work with industry, there's real opportunities if you come from that, you know, technology forward perspective, but also, you know, with, with some negotiation, um, leverage as well to kind of, uh, pursue that.
 Thomas Coleman: I think the last thing that CFO offices are uniquely, uh, positioned to do, and you know, this. From agency to agency, there's some variance with how, how far you can lean into this is, you know, you're responsible for reporting the risks and the state of the agency. And I remember, you know, when I came in CFO, you know, I came into an agency that was running a four trans system that had no digitized records, um, from our inception in 1973.
 Thomas Coleman: And we had a level budget despite being non appropriated and essentially blank check authority. We had a level budget for 15 years. 
 Steven Boberski: Were you issued a Terrace [01:24:00] 80 when you got in the door? Just like in Oh, radio 
 Steven Boberski: Shack. Right up the 
 Thomas Coleman: bat. There was literally fire code issues with our file room. Um. And one of the first things I did was sat down with the auditor.
 Thomas Coleman: You do the, you know, we had an external audit like a lot of agencies do, and you know, you do that kind of entrance conference, the CFO and I slid them over a couple files and say, here, here's all of our problems. Light us up. Um, and, you know, they seemed really confused and, you know, I explained it to, you know, my boss, uh, deputy assistant secretary of our treasury, you know, if, for those of you who seen in glorious bastards, I'm like, yeah, I've been chewed out before.
 Thomas Coleman: Like, send me wherever I need to go, but I'm getting budget to fix this. And, you know, we did get a 50% increase in our budget because it was long overdue through OMB apportionment and having that courage and understanding how to use in a responsible way. You know, depending on your situations, the ability to kind of dictate risk management, what you put out there and saying the [01:25:00] bad stuff and not just hiding it.
 Thomas Coleman: Really can facilitate not just for your office, but you know, the overall agency, what you're able to do, um, from a modernization perspective. 
Clarence Crawford: I'll just add that as a practical matter. We've talked about the CFO being involved in strategy and advising. You can't do strategy and advising if all of your people are managing spreadsheets.
Clarence Crawford: That's right. So part of the challenge with the CFO and, and why I think they'll move in this area is that you have to be able to create value and managing spreadsheets is not value. So the degree to which you can begin to free up your staff to focus on analysis, to help analyze data. [01:26:00] To be a strategic business partner is contingent upon getting as much of the, of the manual routine kinds of things that have taken up so much time in a CFO shop using AI and other tools like that to free up that, that time so that you have the, the time and, and the focus to be that strategic advisor.
Clarence Crawford: So, oh, go ahead. Do you wanna add, 
Sarah Cunningham: just wanna build a little bit on what was said. Can't agree more. And I think that's one of the things too, one of the, the consequences of taking this approach, one of the consequences of modernization in a good way is that it helps break down the silos that makes things so hard.
Sarah Cunningham: It's really kind of not just thinking about data as a strategic asset within you each shop, but data is a strategic asset for the enter. Yes, it opens up so many different [01:27:00] possibilities. And also like one of our big problems when I was at HUD and at the county, and a lot of the people that I work with now and at OMB is that sometimes we were doing data collections and workarounds and we just kept adding.
Sarah Cunningham: We just kept adding data, new data collections, because we couldn't make the stuff that we were getting from the original work. And now we've got Franken data. You know, it's a big monster that's kind of got its own life running around the agency and taking up all of our server spaces and our cloud and we may not need or use a lot of it.
Sarah Cunningham: So being able to find that value by collaboration, by saying what's really important? What are those business questions and business problems we're trying to solve? Being able to start, start from a human-centric design where you're thinking about what is the program mission, what is it trying to do, who is it working with?
Sarah Cunningham: What are the needs all up and down that value chain? And then being able to put those into, here's what the vision is and here are the incremental steps that we can [01:28:00] be taking for small, quick wins towards that goal. 'cause the other thing that's happened in a lot of CFO shops and how does one of 'em, we've had a lot of big failures.
Sarah Cunningham: 'cause we tried to start eating the elephant in a one sandwich. Not that I, I don't actually support eating the elephants. I apologize. It's a really bad metaphor. But, you know, we were trying to boil the ocean, so to speak. We're trying to do one whole, like complete whole financial transformation all at once.
Sarah Cunningham: Big old project. And how many of those do we have frontline experience regardless of where we sit in an agency or from a public, a private sector supporting company, seen 'em fail. So it's about trying to figure out how can we take those quick wins. And make incremental progress towards that vision of less silos and more intelligent data as a strategic asset.
 Steven Boberski: I would, I would like, we have a little time here, so before we get to questions, I wanna add one more thing. So I like the procurement myth concept, right? So, uh, if anybody here knows Sariah Chore, um, you know, she's a big [01:29:00] procurement wonk and, uh, I was having lunch with her one day. She said her favorite question to ask when she she's in class is, I'll give anybody $500 if you can show me where in the far it says you can't talk to industry when there's a procurement on the street, right?
 Steven Boberski: Doesn't exist. There is no such thing. If you talk to industry and you say something you shouldn't, you have to publish. You don't have to say where you publish. There's, there's a way to handle this, right? But industry, we would love to get to you guys when there's, just to hear more. Not the q and a doesn't work, but so, so let's just talk real quick about everybody else that gets up here.
 Steven Boberski: We're all industry, almost 
 Steven Boberski: all industry today, unfortunately, but, but. We would like to know what you would like to see from us to help. You know, we wanna sell stuff to you, right? You wanna buy stuff from us. How can we make it easier for the CFO? We know how to make it easier for the CIO. He tells us every day we know how to make it for the CISO as well.
 Steven Boberski: But what about the C? You know, it's gotta get to you. What can we do to make it easier for you or make, and, you know, better experience across the board. 
 Thomas Coleman: Be creative about different pricing models, invest in thinking about how you can deliver in different [01:30:00] structures. Um, some agencies it's more effective to do outcome-based pricing, and sometimes that can be very difficult to figure out like, what is a price per application process per, you know, use of a website for, for a specific service.
 Thomas Coleman: Think about how you can make economic models with backloading acceptable from a risk perspective. I think the number one thing that I've seen, you know, now that I'm a member of industry, but also on the government side, is just this inflexible model when you're engaging even from the market research perspective.
 Thomas Coleman: And that question comes up, you know, okay, like, how can we buy this? And there's like, well, this is how we sell it. It's this much per year. Conversations die at that point. And so especially now where things are to, to put it lightly a little leaner, having someone in the room that can ideate with government on how to make it work for them is probably the number one biggest piece of advice I can give.
 Steven Boberski: Do you run a, [01:31:00] I mean, how do you just, how do you overcome the far challenge? There are a lot of contract contractual restrictions on what you can and can't do. How you buy, how to pay for something. There's always a way to get around it. But how do you deal with the contract officer that says, uh, absolutely not.
 Thomas Coleman: Um, you know, at a certain point you hit a brick wall, right? And that happens, and I think we've all experienced it where, you know, the program side, CFO or whoever's purchasing is like CO says, we can't talk. We can't talk. Um, you know, I happen to be a procurement attorney, so, you know, I'm able to kind of do some of those far sites and, you know, in the most friendly way possible, try and suggest, you know, there are ways to talk to us.
 Thomas Coleman: Sometimes that helps sometimes. You still hit the brick wall. I think the key is to, you know, not do the hard sale pressure where a program office feels like they might get in trouble, and the more you can be like, Hey, we've helped navigate this before, let's keep the conversation going. You know, look for a side door in to have those discussions.
 Thomas Coleman: I think it's all about creating [01:32:00] comfort for who you're talking to, understanding that they probably don't know what the rules are and you know, they're gonna be very skittish maybe about those conversations. I 
 Steven Boberski: think the music's gonna start playing in the background. Do, do you wanna go write the questions or We let 'em finish the 
Clarence Crawford: You can 
Martha Dorris: finish.
Clarence Crawford: Okay. And then, we'll, I'm just gonna take a little different perspective. There's a tremendous green field opportunity in public education. You're looking at half a trillion dollars a year in spend. They are struggling with not being able to hire enough teachers, and even if they could, they can't afford it.
Clarence Crawford: So looking at things that could be done to support teaching of students, things that could be done in terms of helping [01:33:00] teachers with administration. There's tremendous opportunity. There's hardly anybody in that space and I, and for local governments, they're spending probably about half or more of their budgets on education.
Clarence Crawford: So again, as you're looking at this and taking what you're learning, there's a green field out there in those states where I think they would be open to some real, uh, suggestions about how they could improve, deliver services to students and reduce administrative costs.
Sarah Cunningham: It is really hard to follow that up because that that is 
Sarah Cunningham: Yes, a hundred percent everything Clarence just said. Um, I wanted to build a little bit off of what Tom was saying though, in terms of how to make it easier for the CFO, how to make it easier for the agency. Do your homework. Read the appropriations.
Sarah Cunningham: [01:34:00] Read the report language. Listen to the hearings, understand what questions folks on the hill have. Look at the president's budget. That tells you what our financial constraints are. That tells you the framework that we're operating in. And to Tom's point, being able to say, be flexible. Be flexible, and help us navigate.
Sarah Cunningham: You can see what's enacted. You can see what all of those constraints are. Help us think through what are some of the ways that we can make that incremental progress. So we have that win. We have the story to tell that will help us invest in those improvements over the long run. 
Martha Dorris: Well, I want to thank this panel for me.
Martha Dorris: This didn't disappoint. I, I, I have a good friend that is a CFO. You gotta have thick skin to be CFOs too, because we're all trying to get money and explain what we're trying to do. And you guys are like, you have like radar on like sifting through the BS too. So I [01:35:00] know that that, uh. You've given us a lot of great tips that, that are, um, important to all of us, including everybody doing their research and understanding the agency and the, the problems, and meeting the mission.
Martha Dorris: And, and I think no thinking of CFOs not as spreadsheet, you know, an analyst and thinking of them as in many cases, they're really running the overall strategy of the, of the agency. And, and I think it's an important role that we have not yet cracked the code on. So appreciate you all, you all coming and giving us your insights and giving us tips on how we can, you know.
Martha Dorris: Meet the CFOs in agencies, so thank you. It was 
AUDIENCE: an awesome ad. It was awesome. CFO was awesome. 
Yohanna: Yeah.
Yohanna: If you're passionate about technology and eager to explore more incredible events, make sure to visit act iac.org/upcoming-events. Keep your curiosity [01:36:00] sparked and your calendars marked. Until next time, stay inspired and connected.
Speaker 20: Before we get started, if you're listening from our website, make sure you're following the buzz on your favorite podcast app. You can follow the show on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen that ensures you get all future episodes as soon as they drop.
Speaker 20: Hey there and welcome back. I'm your host Joanna Baez, and I'm happy you're joining us today. A few weeks ago, ACT IAC held a fantastic customer experience event. And for those of you who might have missed it, don't worry, we've got you covered. This panel discusses the intersection of financial management and service delivery.
Speaker 20: Get ready to be inspired as we [01:37:00] explore the future of customer experience together. So while the pa the panel is coming up, I just wanted to, um, give a little background on this. Um. As a community that focuses on customer experience and service delivery, we've known for years the efficiency gains that you can, you can get from applying a customer focused, customer centric, um, philosophy.
Speaker 21: So we've long known that we needed to engage the chief financial officers within agencies as you're creating your business cases and getting them to understand what customer experience is, understand the efficiency gains. And so this is the first time that we've really brought together the CFO community with the customer experience and service, um, delivery community.
Speaker 21: So I would like to introduce our moderator, um, who will be Steve Borsky, the private sector, CTO for Genesis Public [01:38:00] Sector. Yes. Tell me again. Public sector. Public, what did I say? Private sector. Private sector. I wish I was a private sector. CTO that would. Really cool. We have one of those, well, my notes say private sector, so it's not my fault.
Speaker 21: Anyway, welcome to this panel and, um, as, as you're listening to this, think about as agencies and, and industry, as you're helping your government clients, they need to start talking to their CFOs and getting them engaged in this conversation. So I'm thrilled to, to, uh, hear what you guys have to say. Thank you.
Speaker 23: Turn these on, by the way. Okay. I probably don't need a mic, but, um, we'll do some quick introductions. My name's Steve Oberski, as you said. I work for Genesis. We are a, um, an AI powered, uh, experience orchestration platform. Carter Magic quadrant leader for c. If you'd like to learn more about that, we've got a booth in the back.
Speaker 23: Love to have chat with you. Um, and, uh, let just work right through the panel. This is great. Hi, Clarence Crawford. I'm a retired, uh, federal CFO and I'm also, [01:39:00] um, adjunct professor at American University. Nice to be with you all today. I am Tom Coleman. I am the former, uh, CFO of Treasury Federal Financing Bank, and look forward to having this discussion.
Speaker 27: Good morning. I am Sarah Cunningham. I used to be Sarah Berg for those that are in federal creditee stuff. Uh, my background is I've been a govey for most of my career. I'm currently a partner with Summit, but I was the assistant chief financial officer for budget at hud, acting in many different capacities over my time, getting into all sorts of cool things on the CFO side.
Speaker 27: And I also spent three years as a local government, CFO, so kinda, uh, from the OMB side to the recipient side. Looking forward to today, it is really exciting. Martha pointed out, uh, correctly that, you know, we really don't get an opportunity to put the CFOs up here. You know, you think customer experience gets ct, OCIO, cus CXOs customer experience, chief Knowledge officers.
Speaker 23: But the, the, the charter for the CFO and the federal government is, is not [01:40:00] just financial, right? You have financial stewardship and, and management. You have the risk management, but you're also supposed to be a strategic advisor and, and a transformation architect. How do you balance those roles? Clarence?
Speaker 24: I think that one of the things that, as I talk to CFOs around, I tell them that if the only thing you can do is talk about money, uh, you're being overpaid. Um, your job is in, in, in essence to improve and increase value. So being able to understand and being able to communicate that and being able to, and the CFO's uniquely positioned to be able to see across the enterprise and then be able to offer suggestions, uh, that others cannot do.
Speaker 25: I would absolutely agree with what Clarence says. The way I think of it is kind of, there's like a Maslow's hierarchy of CFO needs, and at the bottom of that is financial audit. You need to pass one of those risk management, payment integrity, those are all really, really [01:41:00] important. We could talk about that, but that's a different conference above that is continuing evolution.
Speaker 26: And it's exactly, you know, as was mentioned, the role of strategic advisor. And so I think of those two words kind of as separate objectives for a, uh, modern CFO from a strategy perspective. And, and this is exactly what Clarence mentioned, you know, most offices in agencies think about their money in one year terms.
Speaker 26: And only in terms of their program, what the CFO can do, especially in the CX space. And I've got a recent example from A-C-F-O-I was talking to is, you know, if they have a system that's a legacy system, it's a, in this case it was a lending platform that the public had to interact with. They need to modernize it.
Speaker 26: Well, there's not the budget, um, in the CFO, who's the product owner to modernize that. But on the other side, in a completely different office, there's a gigantic help desk contract. And that contract is huge [01:42:00] because the system doesn't allow for self-service. The system is complicated. It doesn't have some of those automated data checks on applications that the prior panel talked about.
Speaker 26: So A CFO can look across the organization and think in multi-year, how do I get from A to B? And how do I do that in a way that I can advocate even with level resources, where to make cuts to get to a point where the agency is operating in a more efficient manner. And that's really the strategic role. I think the advisor role is also important.
Speaker 26: You know, a lot of times, you know, it's easy for a CFO to say, I need to be involved in every decision, and then everyone rolls their eyes when you have to approve their procurement. But if you can provide something of value. And from a CFO shop, what we do really well is data-driven decision making and help organizations when they're looking to make these purchases, think strategically about how do I get best value?
Speaker 26: I remember about seven years ago when all these conferences had RPA instead of ai, and there were a lot of procurements in the [01:43:00] RPA space. I was with a product company. We were competing for a lot of these, and a few of those said, you know, propose what your ROI is, period. No benchmarks, no, no nothing. So my sales guy said, you know, hey, by completing these two documents, you know, in automated fashion, we can save the agency a hundred million dollars.
Speaker 26: Absolutely ridiculous. But the agency had no way to validate. CFO Shop has the skills to partner with these other organizations to really improve what they do by bringing what we can provide and what we already do on the traditional CFO activities. And that's a way to get invited into the conversation, which allows you to.
Speaker 26: Have more influence as a strategic advisor. That's, there's a lot of good stuff in the, oh, lemme try that again. Um, there's a lot of great stuff there. And I think one of the things, kind of going back to basics as CFOs, we are a multihyphenate. We really need to be thinking about wearing all of the hats at [01:44:00] once.
Speaker 27: We need to be thinking about risk and risk management. We wanna mitigate risk, but we can't bring risk down to zero because then we can't do anything about the mission and then we failed. If we wanna make sure that we've got data and that we've got data to inform decisions, but we need to be able to make sure we're collecting the right data.
Speaker 27: We're not collecting too much, we're not doing so in a way that impairs privacy is insecure. We wanna keep those two things up. We also wanna be thinking about what is the burden internally on our internal customers that need that data for other purposes. What is the burden on the recipients and subrecipients for those systems?
Speaker 27: Um, kind of like what the, the earlier, um, panel was talking about, you know, what are some of the creative ways that we can, from our vantage point, because we see where all the dollars go, which means we get to see all the operations, we get to see the program dollars, the missions. We're also the ones who are usually facilitating the audit in places where you find all the [01:45:00] problems.
Speaker 27: And so how are the ways we can do creatively, we can't do that as CFOs without really engaging across disciplines, across the organization and across the entire value chain to understand the customer experience with a very broad definition of customer and client. So kind of thinking through how do you balance them?
Speaker 27: You need to kind of wear all the hats at once, and I would really encourage those of you who are working with CFOs, being able to put the problem. Where there's a technology solution in terms of what is the business problem, what is the potential for being able to solve a pain point? What is the potential for being able to deliver something new or, you know, get rid of millions of dollars and millions of dollars of costs and people that are trying to do workarounds manually for legacy systems.
Speaker 27: Being able to put those technology solutions in terms of people, and starting with human-centric [01:46:00] design means A CFO really needs to be a people person, not just an accountant anymore. That, that's, that's kind of where I was going. I mean, you, you have so much reach and so much visibility. I think, you know, we don't all think of that role traditionally in that view.
Speaker 23: Right. You know, it's, it's not just procurement dollars and I'm sure the procurement process, it's exceptionally fun as a CFO as well. Um, but you know, we'll talk a little bit about the professional side of it first. So you have to balance risk and budget constraints. Mandates, federal mandates that usually come without any dollars attached.
Speaker 23: Right. And then technology is expanding far beyond a, a piece, far beyond anybody expected. AI alone, we just, we spend all day talking. We will spend all the day talking about AI today. Um, uh, and, but for sure, uh, what are some, how do you qualify success when you trying to tackle the traditional role of financial management against this landscape of it that's just booking it?
Speaker 23: I mean, what, what, how would you, what's best practice or how would you define success? We go right down the road. One of the things I would just say is, I'm gonna step [01:47:00] back a little bit and say that one of the roles of the, of the CFO is to be proactive. You can't just sit there and wait for unfunded mandates to arrive.
Speaker 24: You need to actively engage with OMB. And the hill in advance. And as you build these relationships, my experience is sometimes some of these things that you receive would've otherwise, uh, gotten as an unfunded mandate. You can head that off with conversations. So building strong relationships with OMB and in particular on the Hill with the House and Senate, your House and Senate, um, appropriation subcommittee, staff.
Speaker 24: Democrat and Republican, majority and minority, being able to have a relationship with them to be able to talk to them. Because sometimes what you'll see is some of these things that show up as an [01:48:00] unfunded mandate are things that the hill has been telegraphing for a while. If you, if you know where to look, look at what's called the report language.
Speaker 24: The report language tells you what they think. So being able to understand that and perhaps head some of those issues off, because once you get it as a mandate, you're stuck with it. But if you can sort of deflect it or help shape it, you're in a much better position. No, I think those are excellent points.
Speaker 26: I kind of want to take this question in two parts. First, addressing unfunded mandates and what A CFO can do in that respect. I think one of the things we can do to stay prepared is to think strategically about organizational capabilities and assets. This goes again to how the CFO's role is unique as opposed to other organizations, is that we kind of look, are looking across the enterprise.
Speaker 26: We know where modernization is happening, where there are potential needs, and so if we can think strategically [01:49:00] about investments and how do we take something, you know, that is a really positive way of. Let's say doing application intake in one part of the organization for the public and federate that into other areas and always be thinking about what is that baseline level of technology that's gonna help us be agile and responsive.
Speaker 26: You know, we have that insight and we have that capability and it really, you know, dovetails with a lot of what we're seeing in this administration around procurement and, you know, using economies of scale to negotiate better deals. And can we kind of facilitate that within our organization in terms of what success looks like for the CFO um, role?
Speaker 26: You know, I think it's a lot easier to define what failure is. You know, there are the things that can go wrong that we know, like not, not passing an audit, having a negative program audit, you know, payment integrity issues, reputational risk. So, so there's really two answers I have to that. One, try really hard not to fail.
Speaker 26: [01:50:00] Um, and the second, you know, leave. With positive, sustainable change and sustainable is really, you know, the key there is, you know, what can you do to move, uh, your agency forward? And that's different in every single situation. But I think the fundamental key to that, which is the key also to not failing, is to build a strong team and bringing this back to technology, bringing it back to cx.
Speaker 26: I think it's having a team that is not only motivated, high performing, but also understands and is comfortable with change in technology. And the way to do that is to embrace change in technology. Uh, a couple years ago I was talking to a CFO who wanted to improve their acquisition function, and they were asking me, who do you know in the industry that we could bring in that's an innovator?
Speaker 26: It's like, I have a list of eight names. Um, the problem is, is what can you do to attract them? What can you do to retain them? And it's a chicken in the egg. You have to be innovative. So if you're running old technologies and you have to think [01:51:00] about your teams as customers too, you know, and you're trying to recruit those people who really are a technology competent and b, motivated by change aren't going to wanna work at a place that's working 20 years in the past.
Speaker 26: So it's really kind of understanding that investment is critical to kind of maintaining that strong team, which is then going to be driving change in the future. So I love this question. Um, 'cause there's so many right answers, right? Um, and as a former budgeter, I mean, I was at OMB, so I've gotta answer with, you know, what's the definition of success?
Speaker 27: It depends, it's our favorite answer when we're at OMB. It's kind of thinking, what, what, what is it we're trying to solve for? Am I solving for X or is it a, a bigger theorem that I'm trying to pull out? Um, but at the end of the day, I think success from the CFO's perspective is cost effective, efficient delivery on the mission.
Speaker 27: That's that. It's [01:52:00] really that simple. Um, it's out. I mean, in practice and actual application, definitely not that simple. We're navigating complexity. We're trying to figure out how to balance all of these different constraints. And if you can reframe when you get an unfunded mandate, when you get something like that to Clarence's earlier point, well what is it that they're worried about?
Speaker 27: What is that thing that is success and be able to build those relationships and engage with folks to understand, well, what does success look like? It sometimes can open up a very creative solution where you can say, Hey, I might be able to solve this complex problem by bringing a couple of other offices together, and instead of looking at an unfunded mandate or a one-off as a one-off, how does this fit in the bigger system?
Speaker 27: Is there something that I can do to partner with the university? Is there something that I can do to really go out to the customers who are going to the kill and saying, Hey, I really hate how this program is working. Is this taking us [01:53:00] forever? It's clunky. We don't have the money to do all of fill all of these different things out.
Speaker 27: Going out and getting some of that information from an evidence perspective and being able to use that in a story, that's one of the critical things from a CFO's perspective, is being able to engage and help with the storytelling. We don't have to be the storytellers ourselves, but if we understand what the issue is and we can bring the right people together, we can tell the story of, Hey, here's what's possible.
Speaker 27: Here's what we can do to solve your root cause and actually make it better, a better program for everybody. Here's what we can do to save millions of dollars in these legacy systems to attract people who really wanna innovate and make change who are technology savvy. Because we've got those types of things in the workplace.
Speaker 27: We get to use copilot, we get to use, um, all sorts of cool AI tools to do less work that is drudgery and kind of like pointing is A to A, B2B, and kind of like more of the manual part of audit compliance and [01:54:00] things like that. And we can automate those things so we can ask better questions of how well is the money getting to where it needs to go, what are the impacts of these funding?
Speaker 27: But being able to do that storytelling and sometimes breaking it down, not just to here's the huge vision, but what are some of the quick wins. What are something that we can do to show progress towards that bigger goal, towards that bigger story? What's one chapter that we can tell? And getting the data from all of our partners, the CIO shops, the program offices, all of the stakeholders to be able to make it compelling.
Speaker 27: That's really what success is at the end of the day. Just want to add one other thing. You know where the federal government right now is we are going through a significant shift in, in workforce. There's tremendous risk associated with that because typically when an administration or the Congress cuts [01:55:00] workforce, they rarely ever cut scope or mission.
Speaker 24: So as the federal government now is trying to achieve sort of a new steady state. There is tremendous risk. So again, as you look at AI and AI tools, how can you help agents? If I were a CFO in the federal government, now my concerns would be how do we maintain mission in this incredibly, uh, um, changing environment?
Speaker 24: How do we make sure that we leverage technology because it's gonna be, I think it's gonna be easier for agencies to get money for technology than for hiring back people. So how do you then leverage that to help over this next two to three years? It's gonna take a while to sort of reach this new steady state, and during this process, then there's a much higher risk [01:56:00] of an inadvertent mission failure if you don't understand what's going on.
Speaker 23: Um, yeah, I mean the, the role's changing, right? So, you know, Genesis, we, you know, we, we'd say we're a experience orchestration company, right? So we have AI across the board at every touch point, right? We're doing knowledge management enhancement, all those kind of things. So, but we're talking about augmenting staff as well as leveling them up, right?
Speaker 23: Mm-hmm. But, um, this is a customer experience conference. So we're gonna, we're we're gonna talk about customer experience, right? The role of CFO, uh, and how it, how do you think it impacts the, the mission and, and customer experience? It was a mandate from the previous administration. It was not one that was countermanded, so it is still technically in place, and I have yet to run into an agency that says we would not like to improve our customer experience.
Speaker 23: So I think it's always been an initiative. So you have an opportunity to make it a priority, right? So what do you think the CFO's role is, particularly in customer experience? How can you help it be successful? Where we're, where can it fail if you're not involved? Uh, and, and what advice do you have to, you know, to get us involved with the C FFO shop?[01:57:00] 
Speaker 31: Okay. All right, I'll, I'll take a first stab at it. Um, I think there are a couple of ways. Um, one, and, and in my experience, portfolios from agency to agency for what it falls under the CFO shop differ. But a lot of times, CFO does have a role, whether it's in procurement, whether it's in managing grant or loan programs.
Speaker 26: They have a direct role in interacting with the public. So that's kinda, you know, step one is, you know, look to see where your public interactions are in the conventional sense and where there's opportunity not only to improve your efficiency through. Customer experience improvements, which again, is, is something that I think is the greatest benefit, but also kind of the public perceptions of your program, which kind of in a, a second or third degree manner, really kind of long-term dictate your funding.
Speaker 26: If your program is popular, you're likely to, you know, get more congressional support down the road. So make it something that people enjoy engaging with instead of a point of frustration. [01:58:00] I think another area is, you know, the CFO, um, owns. Financial data across the organization, and we are mandated by law to publish that data in, you know, annual reports or sometimes, you know, going beyond that with dashboards to help the public understand how money's being spent.
Speaker 26: I think that again feeds into, you know, the benefits that flow from public perception. You know, if you provide transparency into what you're doing, um, not only is that I think the right thing to do from a public service perspective, but it also can have benefits for the agency and you can only really get to that point where the average citizen can interact with that when you're using things that mirror what they experience in their everyday lives working with private companies.
Speaker 26: Interactive dashboards are like table stakes at this point. No one's going to, you know, sift through except for maybe the people on the stage and a few others. You know, 200 page PDF reports to find, find answers.[01:59:00] 
Speaker 27: So I think kind of bringing it to a few concrete examples, COVID taught us a lot. You know, there's a lot of great examples of what the CFO's role in both success and um, fails. Um, were through the COVID experience. I was a local government, CFO when COVID broke out, and my experience with one of the first CARES Act programs, a coronavirus relief fund, at first it was like, thank God we're getting money that we can use to help do address some of the most critical needs of our community.
Speaker 27: We were having a hard time getting enough, um, PPP or basically, you know, masks and other things for our first responders. We're having a really hard time making sure we had enough ventilators in case people got really sick through our public health department. We had a lot of critical, critical needs, and we were like, this money is great, it's flexible, it's wonderful.
Speaker 27: We can't wait to get it. And this, I don't blame on the, entirely [02:00:00] on the CFOs. This is something where, you know, engaging with Congress and making sure that there is clear lines of understanding of what you know, be careful what you wish for. Um, they wanted to make sure that the money was fully flexible and could be applied to a lot of different needs, and they gave it to us upfront.
Speaker 27: There were no program guidance. They then issued program guidance and FAQs through treasury. That kept changing over time. Sure. And right. And so I'm trying to build a process and hey, here's what we need to be able to use this money quickly and well to our greatest needs in the county. And there was a lot of flack as a customer, as a recipient, it was really difficult to be able to engage with my board of county commissioners, with the county manager, with all of the different,
Speaker 32: I'm not sure that, oh, maybe it was because I mentioned the county manager. She was very, she's, she's still listening, right. [02:01:00] Um, see, very difficult. But you know, when, when I'm trying to say, Hey, we need some internal controls, we need some data. We need to invest a little bit so we can have a system to track these funds and see how they were applied, because we know we're gonna need to do reporting.
Speaker 27: And they're all asking me, well, treasury didn't say you needed to do any of this. Why are you doing it? And then two years later, I'm on the hook to explain all of this to an auditor. Yeah, it, it was very, very difficult. It actually was difficult, not just in the moment, but in the long term, because without that data, without being able to say, here's how we spent it, it's a matter of public trust.
Speaker 27: You know, people question, well, how did you use those funds? Where did they go? How did you, how do we know that they were used for, for good things and for the right things? What were their trade offs? But because we hadn't invested that money up front, we didn't have that clear guidance or mandate to do so it was really, really difficult.
Speaker 27: On the other side, you saw later in COVID when folks started realizing, yeah, we [02:02:00] probably need a little bit of program guidance and internal controls before the money goes out the door. Um, that is something I credit a lot of the CFO shops for engaging with Congress to say, yeah, you don't want fraud. We need to do a little more careful job, making sure the funding goes out to the right people on the right time for the right purpose.
Speaker 27: Um, on the backend, we saw a lot of great collaborations. Uh, I work with, uh, OCA off of ca, office of Capital Access at Treasury, previously Office of Recovery programs, and they built engagement teams that included the financial folks, included the program folks, and included the recipients with that type of a feedback loop.
Speaker 27: They were able to say for one program in particular, the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, the money wasn't getting out the door. They pushed the money out quickly, but they couldn't find renters that. They just couldn't figure out how to find the landlords or renters because the people that received the money didn't have those connections.
Speaker 27: So they were able to create that feedback loop, get [02:03:00] that information up through the CFO's office and say, great, here's how we're gonna restructure the program. It was a full collaboration. They ended up restructuring that program three times over, but because of that restructuring, over 88% of those funds went to people that were very low income or low income, ensured that families were able to stay in their houses when they didn't have access to their jobs, when they couldn't do their day to day.
Speaker 27: And that was, I think, a profound example of the role the CFOs can have in their success. Because the first sign that things weren't going out the door is CFOs looking at the the funding reports. And we were seeing the funds that were there, but we weren't getting any reports that said, Hey, the dollars have been dispersed.
Speaker 27: And so really having those collaborative relationships, A CFO can play a big, big role in facilitating change, kind of feel like the F and CFO could be for facilitating as well as financial [02:04:00] in one of my roles as the CFO and Chief Administrative Officer for U-S-P-T-O fee funded agency. So it is funded by the fees paid by patent and trademark applicants.
Speaker 24: Uh, I was there. We as arrived with the new legislation to make PTO The, uh, performance based organization, uh, played a key role in standing up two advisory committees, a patent advisory committee, and a trademark advisory committee. It started out helping stand up these committees, but then it was then finance, but then it quickly turned to mission.
Speaker 24: Yeah, because what they, the, the two committees liked about the role of the CFO was that we were honest brokers. So they would come to us if they had questions about the patent process. Why is that happening? We've talked to [02:05:00] patents, here's a patent that's telling us. So we were part of that, being able to explain that or, or trademark.
Speaker 24: So we, in that role, I had a direct and, um, uh, complete, uh, access and engagement with customers. Customers would come to us for information. It was more like, it was more like A-A-C-F-O in a private sector organization dealing with stockholders. They came to us for the same kinds of information, what's going on, and then also knowing what their concerns and issues were.
Speaker 24: It allowed me then, as we were talking internally about. Doing this or that, be able to raise the questions about how does that impact what the trademark community is saying? How does that impact the concerns of the patent community? I mean, that's all direct to the customer, right? Yes. You know, it's not just process.
Speaker 23: You guys are touching bodies, which is amazing, [02:06:00] right? Um, so artificial intelligence gotta talk about it, right? It's the latest must have. We, there's clearly advantages to I technology, and you have to do it with guardrails. We've all, we talked about this in the panel before, we're gonna talk about it all day, but how do you guys, you guys control the money, you get whatever you want, right?
Speaker 23: So how do you make sure that you get to take advantage of these tools as a CFO, as a shop, right? Is it the college children, you don't have any shoes or, you know, are too busy feeding everybody else. You don't get to eat. How do you make sure you guys get to play and participate to leverage these tools and, and what's the best practice?
Speaker 23: Maybe make sure you get engaged that way. Like how do you, how do you get to take advantage? I can start on this. There we go. I can start on this one. Um, I like the cobbler shoes. I think my friend Tina Kim, she's a deputy con comptroller for the State of New York Office of Accountability, and she calls it the Theory of the Boring.
Speaker 27: It is true, and it's not just a theory of a boring, this is something where we as CFOs sometimes do it to ourselves. We're so focused on thinking about what's the most [02:07:00] cost effective way to do this. How can I stretch my limited dollars as far as I can, and how can we make sure as much money as possible is going towards the mission that sometimes, you know, it, it can be a blind spot.
Speaker 27: I'll just leave it at that. And so what a best practice is, and what I've seen successful is in navigating the complexity, thinking about the problems and the playing points from a more holistic perspective, not just like, Hey, what is it that I, I have this huge financial reporting issue, but is there a way to bundle that problem with a customer experience?
Speaker 27: If I'm not getting data from my recipients that shows that they were spending the money on a good use, is there an opportunity here to say, Hey, let's make it easier on those end users. Let's say maybe put up a reporting portal and some data standards so that they don't have to spend a lot of money creating their own systems, their own responses, but giving [02:08:00] them an easy button to be able to upload the data that I need to be able to show compliance and to be able to make sure the money's going where it needs to go, but also being able to allow the program office insight into how that money is being spent and capturing that data in a way that can be used as a base of evidence to drive continuous improvement and bigger policy or program changes across the program over time.
Speaker 27: So thinking about things more holistically like that, you know, just imagine a world, if we could have an, I'm a big fan of blockchain. I don't know if anybody is interested. We do have a blockchain working group here for ACT iac, you know, but imagine a world, and I'm not talking for crypto, but if we could use distributed ledger technology to have one source of truth and be able for grantees to say, Hey, upload the information here directly to the blockchain.
Speaker 27: Being able to embed applications, including AI that do risk assessments and validate that information. And then you've got one place where auditors can [02:09:00] access the same documents, the grantees can, any of their oversight entities can, the CFO can just making and is secure and in a privacy supporting way.
Speaker 27: There's all sorts of options. If we can just kind of take a step back and think about the problems as a holistic system as opposed to one-offs, I think. Regardless what office you're in, CFO, you know, program, um, hr, et cetera. If you are not as a leader, actively encouraging your organization to be engaged with the market on technology, you are failing.
Speaker 26: And I think in government specifically, and, and stuns me that this has been the case, you know, for, for my entire career. There are a lot of bad procurement myths in agencies that you cannot do market research and, you know, step one, you know, as CFO. It's like if that exists, you need to kind of, from an executive perspective, clarify that very [02:10:00] quickly and encourage your teams to get out there in the market and just understand what exists, whether you have money for it or not, you know, at the time where you're buying it, you're already too late.
Speaker 26: So at least having a function within your office that understands the relevant technology is absolutely critical. Um, I think you. Per some of my earlier comments, CFO office has an advantage, you know, with that organizational perspective of understanding, you know, where the assets in an agency lie and, you know, there's opportunities to, you know, expand that potentially to your area for a cheaper cost than reprocuring it yourself or even getting your teams involved in just understanding what that is.
Speaker 26: I think there's a role for the CFO office as a negotiator, um, you know, and, and not just kind of with the economies of scale, but also with, uh, prototyping, um, a bit, you know, experimenting with technologies. I think, you know, especially with what we're seeing in [02:11:00] this administration, you know, with, you know, uh.
Speaker 26: Edicts to cut cost. You know, you can work with industry and I think a lot of industry partners that I've seen have started to kind of understand the importance of coming up with creative mechanisms for back loading, cost of some prototyping, of sharing the risk with government. And if you can kind of articulate that and understand what those structures are and work with industry, there's real opportunities if you come from that, you know, technology forward perspective, but also, you know, with, with some negotiation, um, leverage as well to kind of, uh, pursue that.
Speaker 26: I think the last thing that CFO offices are uniquely, uh, positioned to do, and you know, this. From agency to agency, there's some variance with how, how far you can lean into this is, you know, you're responsible for reporting the risks and the state of the agency. And I remember, you know, when I came in the CFO, you know, I came into an agency that was [02:12:00] running a four trans system that had no digitized records, um, from our inception in 1973.
Speaker 26: And we had a level budget despite being non appropriated and essentially blank check authority. We had a level budget for 15 years. Were you issued a ts 80 when you got in the door? Just like in oh, radio Shack right up that there was literally fire code issues with our file room. Um. And one of the first things I did was sat down with the auditor.
Speaker 26: You do the, you know, we had an external audit like a lot of agencies do, and you know, you do that kind of entrance conference, the CFO and I slid them over a couple files and say, here, here's all of our problems. Light us up. Um, and, you know, they seemed really confused and, you know, I explained it to, you know, my boss, uh, deputy assistant secretary of our treasury, you know, if for those of you seen in Glorious Bastard, I'm like, yeah, I've been chewed out before.
Speaker 26: Like, send me wherever I need to go, but I'm getting budget to fix this. And you know, we did get a 50% increase in our budget because it was long overdue through [02:13:00] o and b apportionment and having that courage and understanding how to use in a responsible way. You know, depending on your situations, the ability to kind of dictate risk management, what you put out there and saying the bad stuff and not just hiding.
Speaker 26: It really can facilitate not just for your office, but you know, the overall agency, what you're able to do. Um, from a modernization perspective. I'll just add that as a practical matter. We've talked about the CFO being involved in strategy and advising. You can't do strategy and advising if all of your people are managing spreadsheets.
Speaker 24: That's right. So part of the challenge with the CFO and, and why I think they'll move in this area is that you have to be able to create value and [02:14:00] managing spreadsheets is not value. So the degree to which you can begin to free up your staff to focus on analysis, to help analyze data to be a strategic business partner is contingent upon getting as much of the, of the manual routine kinds of things that have taken up so much time in a CFO shop using AI and other tools like that to free up that, that time so that you have the, the time and, and the focus to be that strategic advisor.
Speaker 27: So, oh, oh, go ahead. Do you wanna add, just wanna build a little bit on what was said. I can't agree more. And I think that's one of the things too. One of the, the consequences of taking this approach, one of the consequences of modernization in a [02:15:00] good way is that it helps break down the silos that makes things so hard.
Speaker 27: It's really kind of not just thinking about data as a strategic asset within each shop, but data is a strategic asset for the enterprise. Yes. It opens up so many different possibilities. And also, like one of our big problems when I was at HUD and at the county, and a lot of the people that I work with now and at OMB, is that sometimes we were doing data collections and workarounds and we just kept adding.
Speaker 27: We just kept adding data, new data collections, because we couldn't make the stuff that we were getting from the original work. And now we've got Franken data. You know, it's a big monster that's kind of got its own life running around the agency and taking up all of our server spaces and our cloud and we may not need or use a lot of it.
Speaker 27: So being able to find that value by collaboration, by saying what's really important? What are those business questions and business problems we're trying to solve? Being able to start, start from a human-centric design [02:16:00] where you're thinking about what is the program mission, what is it trying to do, who is it working with?
Speaker 27: What are the needs all up and down that value chain? And then being able to put those into, here's what the vision is and here are the incremental steps that we can be taking for small, quick wins towards that goal. 'cause the other thing that's happened in a lot of CFO shops and how does one of 'em, we've had a lot of big failures.
Speaker 27: 'cause we tried to start eating the elephant in a one sandwich. Not that I, I don't actually support eating the elephants. I apologize. It's a really bad metaphor. But, you know, we were trying to boil the ocean, so to speak. We're trying to do one whole, like complete whole financial transformation all at once.
Speaker 27: Big old project. And how many of those do we have frontline experience regardless of where we sit in an agency or from a public private sector supporting company, seen 'em fail. So it's about trying to figure out how can we take those quick wins and make incremental progress towards [02:17:00] that vision of less silos and more intelligent data is a strategic asset.
Speaker 36: In a world of evolving threats and shifting mission demands, your agency needs a partner that moves and defends decisively. At Agile Defense, our vision is to bring adaptive innovation to supporting our nation's most important missions. Whether federal defense or civilian we're modernizing critical systems, automating workflows and enhancing mission performance from cybersecurity and digital transformation to data analytics and AI solutions, we transform ideas into operational capabilities quickly and securely with measurable results.
Speaker 36: Visit agile defense.com and see how we can advance your mission together. Agile defense always evolving. I I would like we have a little time here, so before we get to questions, I wanna add one more thing. So I like the procurement myth concept, right? So, uh, if anybody here knows Sariah choa, um, you know, she's a big procurement wonk and, uh, I was having lunch with her one day.
Speaker 23: She said her favorite question to ask when she she's in [02:18:00] class is, I'll give anybody $500 if you can show me where in the far it says you can't talk to industry when there's a procurement on the street, right? Doesn't exist. There is no such thing. If you talk to industry and you say something you shouldn't, you have to publish.
Speaker 23: Don't have to say where you publish. There's, there's a way to handle this, right? But industry, we'd love to get to you guys when there's something just to hear more, you know, not the q and a doesn't work, right? But, so, so let's just talk real quick about everybody else that gets up here. We're all industry, almost all industry today, unfortunately.
Speaker 23: But, but we, we would like to know what you would like to see from us to help. You know, we wanna sell stuff to you, right? You wanna buy stuff from us. How can we make it easier for the cfo? We know how to make it easier for the CIO he tells us every day. We know how to make it for the CISO as well. But what about the C?
Speaker 23: You know, it's gotta get to you. What can we do to make it easier for you and make, and, you know, better experience across the board. Be creative about different pricing models, invest in thinking about how you can deliver in different structures. Um, some agencies it's more effective to do [02:19:00] outcome-based pricing, and sometimes that can be very difficult to figure out like, what is a price per application process per, you know, use of a website for, for a specific service.
Speaker 26: Think about how you can make economic models with backloading acceptable from a risk perspective. I think the number one thing that I've seen, you know, now that I'm a member of industry, but also on the government side, is just this inflexible model when you're engaging even from the market research perspective.
Speaker 26: And that question comes up, you know, okay, like, how can we buy this? And there's like, well, this is how we sell it. It's this much per year. Conversations die at that point. And so especially now where things are to, to put it lightly a little leaner, having someone in the room that can ideate with government on how to make it work for them is probably the number one biggest piece of advice I can give.
Speaker 23: Do you run a, I mean, how do you just, how do you overcome the far challenge? You know, there are a lot of contract contractual [02:20:00] restrictions on what you can and can't do. How you buy, how to pay for something. There's always a way to get around it. But how do you deal with the contract officer that says, uh, absolutely not.
Speaker 26: Um. You, you know, at a certain point you hit a brick wall. Right? And that happens, and I think we've all experienced it where, you know, the program side, CFO or, or whoever's purchasing is like CO says, we can't talk. We can't talk. Um, you know, I happen to be a procurement attorney. So, you know, I'm able to kind of do some of those far sites and, you know, in the most friendly way possible, try and suggest, you know, there are ways to talk to us.
Speaker 26: Sometimes that helps sometimes. You still hit the brick wall. I think the key is to, you know, not do the hard sale pressure where a program office feels like they might get in trouble, and the more you can be like, Hey, we've helped navigate this before, let's keep the conversation going. You know, look for a side door in to have those discussions.
Speaker 26: I think it's all about creating comfort for who you're talking to, understanding that they probably don't know [02:21:00] what the rules are and you know, they're gonna be very skittish maybe about those conversations. I think the music's gonna start playing in the background. Do, do you wanna go write the questions or We let 'em finish the You can finish.
Speaker 24: Okay. And then, we'll, I'm just gonna take a little different perspective. There's a tremendous green field opportunity in public education. You're looking at half a trillion dollars a year in spend. They are struggling with not being able to hire enough teachers, and even if they could, they can't afford it.
Speaker 24: So looking at things that could be done to support teaching of students, things that could be done in terms of helping teachers with administration. There's [02:22:00] tremendous opportunity. There's hardly anybody in that space and I, and for local governments, they're spending probably about half or more of their budgets on education.
Speaker 24: So again, as you're looking at this and taking what you're learning, there's a green field out there in those states where I think they would be open to some real, uh, suggestions about how they could improve, deliver services to students and reduce administrative costs.
Speaker 37: It is really hard to follow that up because that that is Yes, a hundred percent everything Clarence just said. Um, I wanted to build a little bit off of what Tom was saying though, in terms of how to make it easier for the CFO, how to make it easier for the agency. Do your homework. Read the appropriations.
Speaker 27: Read the report language. Listen to the [02:23:00] hearings, understand what questions folks on the hill have. Look at the president's budget. That tells you what our financial constraints are. That tells you the framework that we're operating in. And to Tom's point, being able to say, be flexible. Be flexible, and help us navigate.
Speaker 27: You can see what's enacted. You can see what all of those constraints are. Help us think through what are some of the ways that we can make that incremental progress. So we have that win. We have the story to tell that will help us invest in those improvements over the long run. Well, I want to thank this panel for me.
Speaker 21: This didn't disappoint. I, I, I have a good friend that is a CFO. You gotta have thick skin to be CFOs too, because we're all trying to get money and explain what we're trying to do. And you guys are like, you have like radar on like sifting through the BS too. So I know that that, uh. You've given us a lot of great [02:24:00] tips that, that are, um, important to all of us, including everybody doing their research and understanding the agency and the, the problems and meeting the mission.
Speaker 21: And, and I think no thinking of CFOs not as spreadsheet, you know, an analyst and thinking of them as in many cases, they're really running the overall strategy of the, of the agency. And, and I think it's an important role that we have not yet cracked the code on. So appreciate you all, you all coming and giving us your insights and giving us tips on how we can, you know, meet the CFOs in agencies.
Speaker 21: So thank you. It was an awesome ad. It was an awesome.[02:25:00] 
Speaker 21: So while the pa the panel is coming up, I just wanted to, um, give a little background on this. Um, as a community that focuses on customer experience and service delivery, we've known for years the efficiency gains that you can, you can get from applying a customer focused, customer centric, um, philosophy.
Speaker 21: So we've long known that we needed to engage the chief financial officers within agencies as you're creating your business cases and getting them to understand what customer experiences understand the efficiency gains. And so this is the first time that we've really brought together the CFO community with the customer experience and service, um, delivery community.
Speaker 21: So I would like to introduce our moderator, um, who will be Steve Borsky, the private sector, CTO for Genesis Public Sector. Yes. Tell me again. Public sector. Public, [02:26:00] what did I say? Private sector. Private sector. I wish I was a private sector. CTO. That would be really cool. We have one of those, well, my notes say private sector, so it's not my fault.
Speaker 21: Anyway, welcome to this panel and, um, as, as you're listening to this, think about as agencies and, and industry, as you're helping your government clients, they need to start talking to their CFOs and getting them engaged in this conversation. So I'm thrilled to, to, uh, hear what you guys have to say. Thank you.
Speaker 23: On, by the way. Okay. I probably don't need a mic, but, um, we'll do some quick introductions. My name's Steve Oberski, as she said. I work for Genesis. We are a, um, an AI powered, uh, experience orchestration platform. Carter Magic Quadrant leader for C Cs. If you'd like to learn more about that, we got a booth in the back.
Speaker 23: Love to have chat with you. Um, and, uh, this just work right through the panel. This is great. Hi, Clarence Crawford. I'm a retired, uh, federal CFO and I'm also, um, uh, adjunct professor at American University. [02:27:00] Nice to be with you all today. I am Tom Coleman. I am the former, uh, CFO of Treasury's Federal Financing Bank, and look forward to having this discussion.
Speaker 27: Good morning. I am Sarah Cunningham. I used to be Sarah Berg for those that are in federal creditee stuff. Uh, my background is I've been a govey for most of my career. I'm currently a partner with Summit, but I was the assistant Chief financial officer for budget at hud, acting in many different capacities over my time, getting into all sorts of cool things on the CFO side.
Speaker 27: And I also spent three years as a local government, CFO, so kinda, uh, from the OMB side to the recipient side. Looking forward to today. It is really exciting. Martha pointed out, uh, correctly that, you know, we really don't get an opportunity to put the CFOs up here. You know, you think customer experience, you get C-T-O-C-I-O cus CXOs customer experience, chief Knowledge officers.
Speaker 23: But the, the, the charter for the CFO and the federal government is, is not just financial, right? You have financial stewardship and, and management. You [02:28:00] have the risk management, but you're also supposed to be a strategic advisor and, and a transformation architect. How do you balance those roles? Clarence?
Speaker 24: I think that one of the things that, as I talk to CFOs around, I tell them that if the only thing you can do is talk about money, uh, you're being overpaid. Um, your job is in, in, in essence to improve and increase value. So being able to understand and being able to communicate that and being able to, and the CFO's uniquely positioned to be able to see across the enterprise and then be able to offer suggestions, uh, that others cannot do.
Speaker 25: I would absolutely agree with what Clarence says. The way I think of it is kind of, there's like a Maslow's hierarchy of CFO needs, and at the bottom of that is financial audit. You need to pass one of those risk management, payment integrity, those are all really, really important. We could talk about that, but that's a different conference above [02:29:00] that is continuing evolution.
Speaker 26: And it's exactly, you know, as was mentioned, the role of strategic advisor. And so I think of those two words kind of as separate objectives for a, uh, modern CFO from a strategy perspective. And, and this is exactly what Clarence mentioned, you know, most offices and agencies think about their money in one year terms.
Speaker 26: And only in terms of their program, what the CFO can do, especially in the CX space. And I've got a recent example from A-C-F-O-I was talking to is, you know, if they have a system that's a legacy system, it's a, in this case it was a lending platform that the public had to interact with. They need to modernize it.
Speaker 26: Well, there's not the budget, um, in the CFO, who's the product owner to modernize that. But on the other side, in a completely different office, there's a gigantic help desk contract. And that contract is huge because the system doesn't allow for self-service. The system is [02:30:00] complicated. It doesn't have some of those automated data checks on applications that the prior panel talked about.
Speaker 26: So A CFO can look across the organization and think in multi-year, how do I get from A to B? And how do I do that in a way that I can advocate even with level resources, where to make cuts to get to a point where the agency is operating in a more efficient manner. And that's really the strategic role. I think the advisor role is also important.
Speaker 26: You know, a lot of times, you know, it's easy for a CFO to say, I need to be involved in every decision. And then everyone rolls their eyes when you have to approve their procurement. But if you can provide something of value and from a CFO shop, what we do really well is data-driven decision making and help organizations when they're looking to make these purchases, think strategically about how do I get best value?
Speaker 26: I remember about seven years ago when all these conferences had RPA instead instead of ai. And there were a lot of procurements in the RPA space. I was with a product company. We were competing [02:31:00] for a lot of these, and a few of those said, you know, propose what your ROI is, period. No benchmarks, no, no nothing.
Speaker 26: So my sales guy said, you know, hey, by completing these two documents, you know, in automated fashion, we can save the agency a hundred million dollars. Absolutely ridiculous. But the agency had no way to validate. CFO Shop has the skills to partner with these other organizations to really improve what they do.
Speaker 26: By bringing what we can provide and what we already do on the traditional CFO activities. And that's a way to get invited into the conversation, which allows you to have more influence as a strategic advisor. That's, there's a lot of good stuff in the, oh, lemme try that again. Um, there's a lot of great stuff there.
Speaker 27: And I think one of the things, kind of going back to basics as CFOs, we are a multihyphenate. We really need to be thinking about wearing all of the hats at once. We need to be thinking about risk and risk management. We wanna [02:32:00] mitigate risk, but we can't bring risk down to zero because then we can't do anything about the mission.
Speaker 27: And then we failed. If we wanna make sure that we've got data and that we've got data to inform decisions, but we need to be able to make sure we're collecting the right data. We're not collecting too much, we're not doing so in a way that. Impairs privacy is insecure. We wanna keep those two things up.
Speaker 27: We also wanna be thinking about what is the burden internally on our internal customers that need that data for other purposes? What is the burden on the recipients and subrecipients for those systems? Um, kind of like what the, the earlier, um, panel was talking about, you know, what are some of the creative ways that we can from our vantage point, because we see where all the dollars go, which means we get to see all the operations.
Speaker 27: We get to see the program dollars, the missions. We're also the ones who are usually facilitating the audit in places where you find all the problems. And so how are the ways we can do creatively, we [02:33:00] can't do that as CFOs without really engaging across disciplines, across the organization and across the entire value chain to understand the customer experience with a very broad definition of customer and client.
Speaker 27: So kind of thinking through how do you balance them? You need to kind of wear all the hats at once, and I would really encourage those of you who are working with CFOs, being able to put the problem where there's a technology solution in terms of what is the business problem, what is the potential for being able to solve a pain point?
Speaker 27: What is the potential for being able to deliver something new or you know. Get rid of millions of dollars and millions of dollars of costs and people that are trying to do workarounds manually for legacy systems. Being able to put those technology solutions in terms of people, and starting with human-centric design means A CFO really needs to be a people person, not just an [02:34:00] accountant anymore.
Speaker 23: That, that's, that's kind of where I was going. I mean, you, you have so much reach and so much visibility. I think, you know, we don't all think of that role traditionally in that view. Right. You know, it's, it's not just procurement dollars and I'm sure the procurement process, it's exceptionally fun as a CFO as well.
Speaker 23: Um, but you know, we'll talk a little bit about the traditional side of it first. So you have to balance risk and budget constraints with. Mandates, federal mandates that usually come without any dollars attached. Right. And then technology is expanding far beyond a, a piece, far beyond anybody expected. AI alone, we just, we spend all day talking.
Speaker 23: We will spend all the day talking about AI today. Um, uh, and, but for sure, uh, what are some, how do you qualify success when you trying to tackle the traditional role of financial management against this landscape of it that's just booking it? I mean, what, what, how would you, what's best practice or how would you define success?
Speaker 30: We go right down the road. One of the things I would just say is, I'm gonna step back a little bit and say that one of the roles of [02:35:00] the, of the CFO is to be proactive. You can't just sit there and wait for unfunded mandates to arrive. You need to actively engage with OMB. And the hill in advance. And as you build these relationships, my experience is sometimes some of these things that you receive would've otherwise, uh, gotten as an unfunded mandate.
Speaker 24: You can head that off with conversations. So building strong relationships with OMB and in particular on the Hill with the House and Senate, your House and Senate, um, appropriation subcommittee, staff, Democrat and Republican Majority and minority, being able to have a relationship with them to be able to talk to them.
Speaker 24: Because sometimes what you'll see is some of these things that show up as an unfunded mandate. Are things that the hill has been [02:36:00] telegraphing for a while. If you, if you know where to look, look at what's called the report language. The report language tells you what they think. So being able to understand that and perhaps head some of those issues off, because once you get it as a mandate, you're stuck with it.
Speaker 24: But if you can sort of deflect it or help shape it, you're in a much better position. No, I think those are excellent points. I kind of want to take this question in two parts. First, addressing unfunded mandates and what A CFO can do in that respect. I think one of the things we can do to stay prepared is to think strategically about organizational capabilities and assets.
Speaker 26: This goes again to how the CFO's role is unique as opposed to other organizations, is that we kind of look, are looking across the enterprise. We know where modernization is happening, where there are potential needs, and so if we can think strategically about investments and how do we take something, you know, [02:37:00] that is a really positive way of.
Speaker 26: Let's say doing application intake in one part of the organization for the public and federate that into other areas and always be thinking about what is that baseline level of technology that's gonna help us be agile and responsive. You know, we have that insight and we have that capability and it really, you know, dovetails with a lot of what we're seeing in this administration around procurement and, you know, using economies of scale to negotiate better deals.
Speaker 26: And can we kind of facilitate that within our organization in terms of what success looks like for the CFO um, role? You know, I think it's a lot easier to define what failure is. You know, there are the things that can go wrong that we know, like not, not passing an audit, having a negative program audit, you know, payment integrity issues, reputational risk.
Speaker 26: So, so there's really two answers I have to that. One, try really hard not to fail. Um, and the second, you know, leave. [02:38:00] With positive, sustainable change and sustainable is really, you know, the key there is, you know, what can you do to move, uh, your agency forward? And that's different in every single situation.
Speaker 26: But I think the fundamental key to that, which is the key also to not failing, is to build a strong t. And bringing this back to technology, bringing it back to cx, I think it's having a team that is not only motivated, high performing, but also understands and is comfortable with change in technology. And the way to do that is to embrace change in technology.
Speaker 26: Uh, a couple years ago I was talking to a CFO who wanted to improve their acquisition function, and they were asking me, who do you know in the industry that we could bring in that's an innovator? It's like, I have a list of eight names. Um, the problem is, is what can you do to attract them? What can you do to retain them?
Speaker 26: And it's a chicken and the egg. You have to be innovative. So if you're running old technologies and you have to think about your teams as customers too, you know, and you're trying to [02:39:00] recruit those people who really are a technology competent, and b, motivated by change. Aren't going to wanna work at a place that's working 20 years in the past.
Speaker 26: So it's really kind of understanding that investment is critical to kind of maintaining that strong team, which is then going to be driving change in the future. So I love this question. Um, 'cause there's so many right answers, right? Um, and as a former budgeter, I mean, I was at OMB so I've gotta answer with, you know, what's the definition of success?
Speaker 27: It depends, it's our favorite answer when we're at OMB is kind of thinking, what, what, what is it we're trying to solve for? Am I solving for X or is it a, a bigger theorem that I'm trying to pull out? Um, but at the end of the day, I think success from the CFO's perspective is cost effective, efficient delivery on the mission.
Speaker 27: That's, that, it's really that simple. Um, it's out. I mean, in practice, [02:40:00] an actual application, definitely not that simple. We're navigating complexity. We're trying to figure out how to balance all of these different constraints. And if you can reframe when you get an unfunded mandate, when you get something like that to Clarence's earlier point, well, what is it that they're worried about?
Speaker 27: What is that thing that is success? And be able to build those relationships and engage with folks to understand, well, what does success look like? It sometimes can open up a very creative solution where you can say, Hey, I might be able to solve this complex problem by bringing a couple of other offices together.
Speaker 27: And instead of looking at an unfunded mandate or a one-off as a one-off, how does this fit in the bigger system? Is there something that I can do to partner with the university? Is there something that I can do to really go out to the customers who are going to the kill and saying, Hey, I really hate how this program is working.
Speaker 27: This is taking us forever. It's clunky. We don't have the money to do all of, fill all [02:41:00] of these different things out. Going out and getting some of that information from an evidence perspective and being able to use that in a story, that's one of the critical things from a CFO's perspective, is being able to engage and help with the storytelling.
Speaker 27: We don't have to be the storytellers ourselves, but if we understand what the issue is and we can bring the right people together, we can tell the story of, Hey, here's what's. Here's what we can do to solve your root cause and actually make it better, a better program for everybody. Here's what we can do to save millions of dollars in these legacy systems to attract people who really wanna innovate and make change who are technology savvy.
Speaker 27: Because we've got those types of things in the workplace. We get to use co-pilot, we get to use, um, all sorts of cool AI tools to do less work that is drudgery and kind of like pointing is A to a, B2B, and kind of like more of the manual part of audit compliance and things like that. And we can automate those things.
Speaker 27: So we can [02:42:00] ask better questions of how well is the money getting to where it needs to go, what are the impacts of these funding? But being able to do that storytelling and sometimes breaking it down, not just to here's the huge vision, but what are some of the quick wins? What are something that we can do to show progress towards that bigger goal, towards that bigger story?
Speaker 27: What's one chapter that we can tell? And getting the data from all of our partners, the CIO shops, the program offices, all of the stakeholders to be able to make it compelling. That's really what success is at the end of the day. Okay. Just want to add one other thing. You know, we're the federal government right now is we are going through a significant shift in, in workforce.
Speaker 24: There's tremendous risk associated with that because typically when an administration or the Congress cuts workforce, they rarely ever cut scope or mission. [02:43:00] So as the federal government now is trying to achieve sort of a new steady state, there is tremendous risk. So again, as you look at AI and AI tools, how can you help?
Speaker 24: Agency if I were a CFO in the federal government, now my concerns would be how do we maintain mission in this incredibly, uh, uh, changing environment? How do we make sure that we leverage technology because it's gonna be, I think it's gonna be easier for agencies to get money for technology than for hiring back people.
Speaker 24: So how do you then leverage that to help over this next two to three years? It's gonna take a while to sort of reach this new steady state, and during this process, then there's a much higher risk of an inadvertent mission failure if you [02:44:00] don't understand what's going on. Um, yeah, I mean the, the role's changing, right?
Speaker 23: So, you know, Genesis, we, you know, we, we'd say we're a experience orchestration company, right? So we have AI across the board at every touch point, right? We're doing knowledge management enhancement, all those kind of things. So, but we're talking about augmenting staff as well as leveling them up, right?
Speaker 23: Mm-hmm. But, um, this is a customer experience conference. So we're gonna, we're we're gonna talk about customer experience, right? The role of CFO, uh, and how it, how do you think it impacts the, the mission and, and customer experience? It was a mandate from the previous administration. It was not one that was countermanded, so it is still technically in place, and I have yet to run into an agency that says we would not like to improve our customer experience.
Speaker 23: So I think it's always been an initiative. So you have an opportunity to make it a priority, right? So what do you think the CFO's role is, particularly in customer experience? How can you help it be successful? Where we're, where can it fail if you're not involved? Uh, and, and what advice do you have to, you know, to get us involved with the CFO shop?
Speaker 31: Okay. [02:45:00] All right, I'll, I'll take a first stab at it. Um, I think there are a couple of ways. Um, one, and, and in my experience, portfolios from agency to agency for what it falls under the CFO shop differ, but a lot of times CFO does have a role, whether it's in procurement, whether it's in managing grant or loan programs.
Speaker 26: They have a direct role in interacting with the public. So that's kinda, you know, step one is, you know, look to see where your public interactions are in the conventional sense and where there's opportunity not only to improve your efficiency through. Customer experience improvements, which again, is, is something that I think is the greatest benefit, but also kind of the public perceptions of your program, which kind of in a, a second or third degree manner, really kind of long-term dictate your funding.
Speaker 26: If your program is popular, you're likely to, you know, get more congressional support down the road. So make it something that people enjoy engaging with instead of a point of frustration. I think another area is, you know, the CFO, um, [02:46:00] owns. Financial data across the organization, and we are mandated by law to publish that data in, you know, annual reports or sometimes, you know, going beyond that with dashboards to help the public understand how money's being spent.
Speaker 26: I think that again feeds into, you know, the benefits that flow from public perception, you know, if you provide transparency into what you're doing, um, not only is that I think the right thing to do from a public service perspective, but it also can have benefits for the agency and you can only really get to that point where the average citizen can interact with that when you're using things that mirror what they experience in their everyday lives working with private companies.
Speaker 26: Interactive dashboards are like table stakes at this point. No one's going to, you know, sift through except for maybe the people on the stage and a few others, you know, 200 page PDF reports to find, find answers.
Speaker 27: So [02:47:00] I think. W kind of bringing it to a few concrete examples. COVID taught us a lot. You know, there's a lot of great examples of what the CFO's role in both success and um, fails. Um, were through the COVID experience. I was a local government, CFO when COVID broke out, and my experience with one of the first CARES Act programs, a coronavirus relief fund, at first it was like, thank God we're getting money that we can use to help do address some of the most critical needs of our community.
Speaker 27: We were having a hard time getting enough, um, PPP or basically, you know, masks and other things for our first responders. We're having a really hard time making sure we had enough ventilators in case people got really sick. Through our public health department. We had a lot of critical, critical needs, and we were like, this money is great.
Speaker 27: It's flexible, it's wonderful. We can't wait to get it. And this, I don't blame on the, entirely on the CFOs. This is something where, you know, engaging with Congress and making [02:48:00] sure that there is clear lines of understanding of what you know, be careful what you wish for. Um, they wanted to make sure that the money was fully flexible and could be applied to a lot of different needs, and they gave it to us upfront.
Speaker 27: There were no program guidance. They then issued program guidance in FAQs through treasury. That kept changing over time. Sure. And right. And so I'm trying to build a process and hey, here's what we need to be able to use this money quickly and well to our greatest needs in the county. And there was a lot of flack as a customer, as a recipient, it was really difficult to be able to engage with my board of county commissioners, with the county manager with all the different,
Speaker 32: not sure that, oh, maybe it was because I mentioned the county manager. She was very, she's, she's still listening, right? Um, see, very difficult. But you know, [02:49:00] when, when I'm trying to say, Hey, we need some internal controls, we need some data. We need to invest a little bit so we can have a system to track these funds and see how they were applied, because we know we're gonna need to do reporting.
Speaker 27: And they're all asking me, well, treasury didn't say you needed to do any of this. Why are you doing it? And then two years later, I'm on the hook to explain all of this to an auditor. Yeah, it, it was very, very difficult. It actually was difficult, not just in the moment, but in the long term, because without that data, without being able to say, here's how we spent it, it's a matter of public trust.
Speaker 27: You know, people question, well, how did you use those funds? Where did they go? How did you, how do we know that they were used for, for good things and for the right things? What were their trade offs? But because we hadn't invested that money up front, we didn't have that clear guidance or mandate to do so it was really, really difficult.
Speaker 27: On the other side, you saw later in COVID when folks started realizing, yeah, we probably need a little bit of program guidance and internal controls before the money [02:50:00] goes out the door. Um, that is something I credit a lot of the CFO shops for engaging with Congress to say, yeah, you don't want fraud. We need to do a little more careful job of making sure the funding goes out to the right people on the right time for the right purpose.
Speaker 27: Um, on the backend, we saw a lot of great collaborations. Uh, I work with, uh, OCA off of ca, office of Capital Access at Treasury, previously Office of Recovery programs, and they built engagement teams that included the financial folks, included the program folks, and included the recipients with that type of a feedback loop.
Speaker 27: They were able to say for one program in particular, the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, the money wasn't getting out the door. They pushed the money out quickly, but they couldn't find renters that. They just couldn't figure out how to find the landlords or renters because the people that received the money didn't have those connections.
Speaker 27: So they were able to create that feedback loop, get that information up through the CFO's office and say, great, [02:51:00] here's how we're gonna restructure the program. It was a full collaboration. They ended up restructuring that program three times over, but because of that restructuring, over 88% of those funds went to people that were very low income or low income, ensured that families were able to stay in their houses when they didn't have access to their jobs, when they couldn't do their day to day.
Speaker 27: And that was, I think, a profound example of the role the CFOs can have in their success. Because the first sign that things weren't going out the door is CFOs looking at the the funding reports. And we were seeing the funds that were there, but we weren't getting any reports that said, Hey, the dollars have been dispersed.
Speaker 27: And so really having those collaborative relationships, A CFO can play a big, big role in facilitating change, kind of feel like the F and CFO could be for facilitating as well as financial in one of my roles as the CFO and [02:52:00] Chief Administrative Officer for U-S-P-T-O fee funded agency. So it is funded by the fees paid by patent and trademark applicants.
Speaker 24: Uh, I was there. We as arrived with the new legislation to make PTO The, uh, performance based organization, uh, played a key role in standing up two advisory committees, a patent advisory committee, and a trademark advisory committee. It started out helping stand up these committees, but then it was then finance, but then it quickly turned to mission.
Speaker 24: Yeah, because what they, the, the two committees liked about the role of the CFO was that we were honest brokers. So they would come to us if they had questions about the patent process. Why is that happening? We've talked to patents, here's a patents that's telling us. So we were part [02:53:00] of that, being able to explain that or, or trademark.
Speaker 24: So we, in that role, I had a direct and, um, uh, complete, uh, access and engagement with customers. Customers would come to us for information. It was more like, it was more like A-A-C-F-O in a private sector organization dealing with stockholders. They came to us for the same kinds of information, what's going on, and then also knowing what their concerns and issues were.
Speaker 24: It allowed me then, as we were talking internally about. Doing this or that, be able to raise the questions about how does that impact what the trademark community is saying? How does that impact the concerns of the patent community? I mean, that's all direct to the customer, right? You know, it's not just process.
Speaker 23: You guys are touching bodies, which is amazing, right? Um, so. Artificial [02:54:00] intelligence gotta talk about it, right? It's the latest must have. We, there's clearly advantages to technology and you have to do with guardrails. We've all, we talked about this in the panel before, we're gonna talk about it all day, but how do you guys, you guys control the money, you get whatever you want, right?
Speaker 23: So how do you make sure that you get to take advantage of these tools as a cfo, as a shop, right? You are, is it the college children? You don't have any shoes or, you know, are too busy feeding everybody else. You don't get to eat. How do you make sure you guys get to play and participate to leverage these tools and, and what's the best practice?
Speaker 23: Maybe make sure you get engaged in that way. Like how do you, how do you get to take advantage? I can start on this. Oh, there we go. I can start on this one. Um, I like the Cobbler shoes. I think my friend Tina Kim, she's a deputy con comptroller for the State of New York Office of Accountability, and she calls it the theory of the boring.
Speaker 27: It is true, and it's not just a theory of a boring, this is something where we as CFOs sometimes do it to ourselves. We're so focused on thinking about what's the most cost effective way to do this. How can I stretch my limited dollars [02:55:00] as far as I can, and how can we make sure as much money as possible is going towards the mission that sometimes, you know, it, it can be a blind spot.
Speaker 27: I'll just leave it at that. And so what a best practice is, and what I've seen successful is in navigating the complexity, thinking about the problems and the playing points from a more holistic perspective. Not just like, Hey, what is it that I, I have this huge financial reporting issue, but is there a way to bundle that problem with a customer experience?
Speaker 27: If I'm not getting data from my recipients that shows that they were spending the money on a good use, is there an opportunity here? To say, Hey, let's make it easier on those end users. Let's say maybe put up a reporting portal and some data standards so that they don't have to spend a lot of money creating their own systems, their own responses, but giving them an easy button to be able to upload the data that I need [02:56:00] to be able to show compliance and to be able to make sure the money's going where it needs to go, but also being able to allow the program office insight into how that money is being spent and capturing that data in a way that can be used as a base of evidence to drive continuous improvement and bigger policy or program changes across the program over time.
Speaker 27: Okay, so thinking about things more holistically like that, you know, just imagine a world, if we could have an, I'm a big fan of blockchain. I don't know if anybody is interested. We do have a blockchain working group here for ACT iac, you know, but imagine a world, and I'm not talking for crypto, but if we could use distributed ledger technology to have one source of truth and be able for grantees to say, Hey, upload the information here directly to the blockchain.
Speaker 27: Being able to embed applications, including AI that do risk assessments and validate that information. And then you've got one place where auditors can access the same documents, the grantees can, [02:57:00] any of their oversight entities can, the CFO can just making and is secure and in a privacy supporting way.
Speaker 27: There's all sorts of options. If we can just kind of take a step back and think about the problems as a holistic system as opposed to one-offs, I think. Regardless what office you're in, CFO, you know, program, um, hr, et cetera. If you are not as a leader, actively encouraging your organization to be engaged with the market on technology, you are failing.
Speaker 26: And I think in government specifically, and, and stuns me that this has been the case, you know, for, for my entire career. There are a lot of bad procurement myths in agencies that you cannot do market research and, you know, step one, you know, as CFO. It's like if that exists, you need to kind of, from an executive perspective, clarify that very quickly and encourage your teams to get out there in the market and [02:58:00] just understand what exists, whether you have money for it or not, you know, at the time where you're buying it, you're already too late.
Speaker 26: So at least having a function within your office that understands the relevant technology is absolutely critical. Um, I think you. Per some of my earlier comments, CFO office has an advantage, you know, with that organizational perspective of understanding, you know, where the assets in an agency lie and, you know, there's opportunities to, you know, expand that potentially to your area for a cheaper cost than reprocuring yourself or even getting your teams involved in just understanding what that is.
Speaker 26: I think there's a role for the CFO office as a negotiator, um, you know, and, and not just kind of with the economies of scale, but also with, uh, prototyping, um, a bit, you know, experimenting with technologies. I think, you know, especially with what we're seeing in this administration, you know, with, you know, [02:59:00] uh.
Speaker 26: Edicts to cut cost. You know, you can work with industry and I think a lot of industry partners that I've seen have started to kind of understand the importance of coming up with creative mechanisms for back loading, cost of some prototyping, of sharing the risk with government. And if you can kind of articulate that and understand what those structures are and work with industry, there's real opportunities if you come from that, you know, technology forward perspective, but also, you know, with, with some negotiation, um, leverage as well to kind of, uh, pursue that.
Speaker 26: I think the last thing that CFO offices are uniquely, uh, positioned to do, and you know, this. From agency to agency, there's some variance with how, how far you can lean into this is, you know, you're responsible for reporting the risks and the state of the agency. And I remember, you know, when I came in CFO, you know, I came into an agency that was running a four trans system that had no [03:00:00] digitized records, um, from our inception in 1973.
Speaker 26: And we had a level budget despite being non appropriated and essentially blank check authority. We had a level budget for 15 years. Were you issued a Terrace 80 when you got in the door? Just like in Oh, radio Shack. Right up the bat. There was literally fire code issues with our file room. Um. And one of the first things I did was sat down with the auditor.
Speaker 26: You do the, you know, we had an external audit like a lot of agencies do, and you know, you do that kind of entrance conference, the CFO and I slid them over a couple files and say, here, here's all of our problems. Light us up. Um, and, you know, they seemed really confused and, you know, I explained it to, you know, my boss, uh, deputy assistant secretary of our treasury, you know, if, for those of you who seen in glorious bastards, I'm like, yeah, I've been chewed out before.
Speaker 26: Like, send me wherever I need to go, but I'm getting budget to fix this. And, you know, we did get a 50% increase in our budget because it was long overdue through OMB apportionment and having that courage and [03:01:00] understanding how to use in a responsible way. You know, depending on your situations, the ability to kind of dictate risk management, what you put out there and saying the bad stuff and not just hiding it.
Speaker 26: Really can facilitate not just for your office, but you know, the overall agency, what you're able to do, um, from a modernization perspective. I'll just add that as a practical matter. We've talked about the CFO being involved in strategy and advising. You can't do strategy and advising if all of your people are managing spreadsheets.
Speaker 24: That's right. So part of the challenge with the CFO and, and why I think they'll move in this area is that you have to be able to create value and managing spreadsheets is not [03:02:00] value. So the degree to which you can begin to free up your staff to focus on analysis, to help analyze data. To be a strategic business partner is contingent upon getting as much of the, of the manual routine kinds of things that have taken up so much time in a CFO shop using AI and other tools like that to free up that, that time so that you have the, the time and, and the focus to be that strategic advisor.
Speaker 24: So, oh, go ahead. Do you wanna add, just wanna build a little bit on what was said. Can't agree more. And I think that's one of the things too, one of the, the consequences of taking this approach, one of the consequences of modernization in a good way is that it helps break down the silos that [03:03:00] makes things so hard.
Speaker 27: It's really kind of not just thinking about data as a strategic asset within you each shop, but data is a strategic asset for the enter. Yes, it opens up so many different possibilities. And also like one of our big problems when I was at HUD and at the county, and a lot of the people that I work with now and at OMB is that sometimes we were doing data collections and workarounds and we just kept adding.
Speaker 27: We just kept adding data, new data collections, because we couldn't make the stuff that we were getting from the original work. And now we've got Franken data. You know, it's a big monster that's kind of got its own life running around the agency and taking up all of our server spaces and our cloud and we may not need or use a lot of it.
Speaker 27: So being able to find that value by collaboration, by saying what's really important? What are those business questions and business problems we're trying to solve? Being able to start, start from a human-centric design where you're thinking about what is the program mission, what is it [03:04:00] trying to do, who is it working with?
Speaker 27: What are the needs all up and down that value chain? And then being able to put those into, here's what the vision is and here are the incremental steps that we can be taking for small, quick wins towards that goal. 'cause the other thing that's happened in a lot of CFO shops and how does one of 'em, we've had a lot of big failures.
Speaker 27: 'cause we tried to start eating the elephant in a one sandwich. Not that I, I don't actually support eating the elephants. I apologize. It's a really bad metaphor. But, you know, we were trying to boil the ocean, so to speak. We're trying to do one whole, like complete whole financial transformation all at once.
Speaker 27: Big old project. And how many of those do we have frontline experience regardless of where we sit in an agency or from a public, a private sector supporting company, seen 'em fail. So it's about trying to figure out how can we take those quick wins. And make incremental progress towards that vision of less silos and more [03:05:00] intelligent data as a strategic asset.
Speaker 23: I would, I would like, we have a little time here, so before we get to questions, I wanna add one more thing. So I like the procurement myth concept, right? So, uh, if anybody here knows Sariah Chore, um, you know, she's a big procurement wonk and, uh, I was having lunch with her one day. She said her favorite question to ask when she she's in class is, I'll give anybody $500 if you can show me where in the far it says you can't talk to industry when there's a procurement on the street, right?
Speaker 23: Doesn't exist. There is no such thing. If you talk to industry and you say something you shouldn't, you have to publish. You don't have to say where you publish. There's, there's a way to handle this, right? But industry, we would love to get to you guys when there's, just to hear more. Not the q and a doesn't work, but so, so let's just talk real quick about everybody else that gets up here.
Speaker 30: We're all industry, almost all industry today, unfortunately, but, but. We would like to know what you would like to see from us to help. You know, we wanna sell stuff to you, right? You wanna buy stuff from us. How can we make it easier for the CFO? We know how to make it easier for the CIO. He tells us every day we know how to make it for the CISO as well.
Speaker 23: But what about the C? You know, it's gotta get to you. What can we [03:06:00] do to make it easier for you or make, and, you know, better experience across the board. Be creative about different pricing models, invest in thinking about how you can deliver in different structures. Um, some agencies it's more effective to do outcome-based pricing, and sometimes that can be very difficult to figure out like, what is a price per application process per, you know, use of a website for, for a specific service.
Speaker 26: Think about how you can make economic models with backloading acceptable from a risk perspective. I think the number one thing that I've seen, you know, now that I'm a member of industry, but also on the government side, is just this inflexible model when you're engaging even from the market research perspective.
Speaker 26: And that question comes up, you know, okay, like, how can we buy this? And there's like, well, this is how we sell it. It's this much per year. Conversations die at that point. And so especially now where things are [03:07:00] to, to put it lightly a little leaner, having someone in the room that can ideate with government on how to make it work for them is probably the number one biggest piece of advice I can give.
Speaker 23: Do you run a, I mean, how do you just, how do you overcome the far challenge? There are a lot of contract contractual restrictions on what you can and can't do. How you buy, how to pay for something. There's always a way to get around it. But how do you deal with the contract officer that says, uh, absolutely not.
Speaker 26: Um, you know, at a certain point you hit a brick wall, right? And that happens, and I think we've all experienced it where, you know, the program side, CFO or whoever's purchasing is like CO says, we can't talk. We can't talk. Um, you know, I happen to be a procurement attorney, so, you know, I'm able to kind of do some of those far sites and, you know, in the most friendly way possible, try and suggest, you know, there are ways to talk to us.
Speaker 26: Sometimes that helps sometimes. You still hit the brick wall. I think the key is to, you know, not do the hard sale pressure where a program office feels like [03:08:00] they might get in trouble, and the more you can be like, Hey, we've helped navigate this before, let's keep the conversation going. You know, look for a side door in to have those discussions.
Speaker 26: I think it's all about creating comfort for who you're talking to, understanding that they probably don't know what the rules are and you know, they're gonna be very skittish maybe about those conversations. I think the music's gonna start playing in the background. Do, do you wanna go write the questions or We let 'em finish the You can finish.
Speaker 24: Okay. And then, we'll, I'm just gonna take a little different perspective. There's a tremendous green field opportunity in public education. You're looking at half a trillion dollars a year in spend. They are struggling with not being able to hire enough teachers, and even if they could, they can't afford it.[03:09:00] 
Speaker 24: So looking at things that could be done to support teaching of students, things that could be done in terms of helping teachers with administration. There's tremendous opportunity. There's hardly anybody in that space and I, and for local governments, they're spending probably about half or more of their budgets on education.
Speaker 24: So again, as you're looking at this and taking what you're learning, there's a green field out there in those states where I think they would be open to some real, uh, suggestions about how they could improve, deliver services to students and reduce administrative costs.
Speaker 37: It is really hard to follow that up because that that is Yes, a hundred percent everything Clarence just said. Um, I wanted to build a little [03:10:00] bit off of what Tom was saying though, in terms of how to make it easier for the CFO, how to make it easier for the agency. Do your homework. Read the appropriations.
Speaker 27: Read the report language. Listen to the hearings, understand what questions folks on the hill have. Look at the president's budget. That tells you what our financial constraints are. That tells you the framework that we're operating in. And to Tom's point, being able to say, be flexible. Be flexible, and help us navigate.
Speaker 27: You can see what's enacted. You can see what all of those constraints are. Help us think through what are some of the ways that we can make that incremental progress. So we have that win. We have the story to tell that will help us invest in those improvements over the long run. Well, I want to thank this panel for me.
Speaker 21: This didn't disappoint. I, I, I have a good friend that is a CFO. You gotta have thick [03:11:00] skin to be CFOs too, because we're all trying to get money and explain what we're trying to do. And you guys are like, you have like radar on like sifting through the BS too. So I know that that, uh. You've given us a lot of great tips that, that are, um, important to all of us, including everybody doing their research and understanding the agency and the, the problems, and meeting the mission.
Speaker 21: And, and I think no thinking of CFOs not as spreadsheet, you know, an analyst and thinking of them as in many cases, they're really running the overall strategy of the, of the agency. And, and I think it's an important role that we have not yet cracked the code on. So appreciate you all, you all coming and giving us your insights and giving us tips on how we can, you know.
Speaker 21: Meet the CFOs in agencies, so thank you. It was an awesome ad. It was awesome. CFO was awesome. Yeah.[03:12:00] 
Speaker 20: If you're passionate about technology and eager to explore more incredible events, make sure to visit act iac.org/upcoming-events. Keep your curiosity sparked and your calendars marked. Until next time, stay inspired and connected.