Headlines

Challenges and Opportunities as FM Evolves
The Controller’s Perspective

by Ann Anderson

It’s been almost six months since Financial Management reorganized. With the retirement of Frank Montgomery, the Controller’s Office was restructured to increase the visibility of the two major customer service areas, Research Accounting and Analysis (RAA) and Student Financial Services (SFS), by elevating them organizationally to report directly to V’Ella Warren. In addition, the Decision Support Center was established to work on behalf of leaders in schools, colleges and administrative units (including Financial Management) to provide analytical support. This work is proceeding quite nicely, and Decision Support has organized with other central decision support units to provide more cohesiveness in their efforts to work with the new and developing data warehouses.

So, what has this change meant for Payroll, Financial Services and Financial Accounting, the units remaining in the Controller’s area? The primary focus is to benefit all customers including research faculty, students and all other customer groups. Coordination between SFS, RAA and Decision Support will reach across functional areas and focus on shared responsibilities, such as cash management, system integrity, compliance and risk. In that vein, I am leading a team composed of Cindy Gregovich in Payroll, Tami Sadusky in GCA, Jeff Follman in Financial Accounting, Karen Long in Financial Services and Nate Findley from Decision Support, to identify opportunities across the different functional areas where we can create and share knowledge. Not only is this consistent with the FM Knowledge Worker initiative, but we’re also developing outcomes that will have a positive impact on our customers.

This team is working on two separate yet related projects. First of all, we are working to develop a cash management metric to evaluate the overall effectiveness of all our cash-related activities. While many of us are familiar and/or involved with individual measures for various cash activities, we don’t have a composite measure which brings together all our activities. We believe this is critical to achieving our strategic goal of growing funds for the University. This means we need to determine, in a comprehensive way, whether we are investing effectively, bringing cash in fast enough and holding onto cash long enough before disbursing it.

The goal for our second project is to provide better, more coordinated information to assist those on campus involved in international or global activities. For example, the UW has many research projects where much of the work is focused and/or conducted in foreign locations, primarily for infectious disease training, prevention and treatment. In addition, international instructional activities take place all over the world. The University also brings international scholars, students and employees here to work and study. All of these foreign activities have fiscal components with varying levels of complexity. Through our work we’ve learned there is no single place where information about these activities can be found. Thus, one of our primary objectives is to change all that by developing a single webpage where all the fiscal information related to foreign work can be accessed.

As these efforts wind down, we’ll be looking for additional areas where we can expand our collective knowledge as well as develop useful solutions for our customers.