Air Force Service Day: financial managers: making a difference today and tomorrow.

What a great turnout we've got for this year's event--and it's not in Hawaii! PDI Service Day is an excellent opportunity for all of us to gather together and, as you just saw from our awards, celebrate the success of so many of our teammates.

It's also a great opportunity to examine what we're doing or going to do to secure tomorrow's success [and] to continue to beat the drum, pound the horn, and stir the pot in thinking about how we make a difference in the future--how to optimize the contributions you will make to the Air Force and the nation five, ten, fifteen years from now.

The Vision

In our first year together, we began to build this future with a vision--a compelling vision of what can be, a vision of hope and opportunity to shape the future of the Air Force, a vision to have a well-trained, highly educated and respected professional civilian and military workforce, a vision of streamlined and efficient processes enabled by technology, accurate and timely financial information, along with sophisticated decision support.

Strategic partners, the ultimate choice for information, a world-class team delivering the best in financial services, especially decision support ... that's what we want to be.

Last year, we took steps to crystallize the vision and make it more actionable. From that came our financial management [FM] strategic plan that uses tools like the Balanced Scorecard to focus on three key themes: War fighter Support, Strategic Resourcing and Cost Management, and Information Integration and Reliability. All of our transformation task forces and initiatives are working hard to support the plan's three themes and ultimately achieve our vision.

Indeed, as many of our awards today reflect, we are making steady and measured progress toward this vision. But I know that there are those who perhaps are weary of hearing the t-word used so often. Well, as I've frequently said before, it is the responsibility of leadership to continually challenge and drive their organizations toward constant renewal and improvement. That's why this year we'll take another bold step in our transformation journey.

Service Delivery Model

As I said, we started with the vision, then created the Strategic Plan to give it more definition. Now this year we'll operationalize the Strategic Plan with the Service Delivery Model [SDM], which will lay out very clearly not only what services we'll deliver, but also who will deliver them and how, from where and when--"who, what, where, how, and when"--questions not fully answered by the Vision and the Strategic Plan. So let's talk about this Service Delivery Model and its broad outlines.

In my visits to where you work and live, I discovered a couple of things: We are blessed by extraordinary and motivated talent whose sheer determination makes the seemingly impossible happen. I also saw you coming under increasingly greater pressure to perform; in some cases, you were struggling to do more with less, compelling you to work harder and longer hours.

But when I looked closer, I also saw you do things you probably shouldn't and not do things you probably should. I saw redundancy at all levels (base, MAJCOM, Air Staff). I saw you overdeliver in some areas but underdeliver in others. And I saw that many of our legacy processes are still cumbersome and do not take advantage of new technologies. I saw inflexibility, instability, inefficiency.

So to help us make sense of this and rationalize what we do or don't do, we decided to filter our processes through a core competency lens, or assessment. The idea is that we should do things that support and strengthen the three Air Force Core Competencies--developing airmen, technology to the warfighter, and integrating operations. The reverse is also true: We should divest ourselves of activities that don't support these core competencies.

That kind of filtering or assessment gives us rich insights about what services we should be delivering and the potential savings (in terms of people, time, and money) we can reap from not doing certain activities.

But that addresses only the "what" and that's where the SDM comes in to propose: Who will deliver this rationalized set of services (military, civilian, or contractor?), from where these services will be delivered (centralized or decentralized?); and when and how these services will be delivered (9 to 5 or 24/7; Web site, call center, etc.?)

We are still working on fully defining the model and expect to have a working version by the end of the summer, but its broad outlines are clear with profound people-process-technology implications: more streamlining, more automation, greater use of shared services and outsourcing solutions, and greater emphasis on the way in which we recruit, educate, train, develop, and retain our people.

But we're not waiting for the unveiling of the model before we act. We've already taken steps in all these areas through our transformation projects, as I mentioned earlier. For example, with DEAMS (the Defense Enterprise Accounting and Management System) we're on the verge of having an honest-to-goodness accounting system. This fully compliant, modern, integrated accounting package combines a general ledger with accounts payable, accounts receivable, and financial reporting.

On a smaller scale, we're working with DFAS to make myPay even more user-friendly. Indeed, we're extending its access with kiosks in high-density areas of a base. We're piloting this at Keesler [Air Force Base] and expect to expand this to other bases. The goal is to make myPay the default option for routine pay issues and make self-service ubiquitous. Later this year, for example, we will shut off hard copy, snail-mail LESs [Leave and Earnings Statements] and W-2s and go to eLESs and eW-2s.

In the people area, I'm excited about a skills and competency model we've built that has created much greater clarity about our expectations of the skills and capabilities that our people must possess to grow and develop, implement the SDM, and achieve our vision. Using this [skills] model, we've recently conducted field assessments of our workforce to determine the gaps between our current capabilities and those that we must "strap on" for the future.

Along these lines, we've also started to deliberately link all of our training and educational opportunities to assignment experiences to create a synergistic effect that increases a worker's "stock" and produces great value to the Air Force. The idea is to purposefully lay out comprehensive career paths that achieve both personal and organizational goals. The way to do that is through well-designed processes that invest the right education, training, and job experience in the right people at the right time, complemented by a meaningful and supportive mentoring structure.

Summary

Is all this tough to do? Yes! Is it radical? No! No more radical then when SurePay was first introduced. Some of you might recall how transformational that was and the naysayers who said it would never work. When I tell airmen that story, they can't believe people were paid any way other than SurePay.

Indeed, I want to return here for a 15-year reunion and hear the SAF/FM talk about how FM is a valuable partner to commanders, how it's core and relevant to the Air Force mission, how the decision support FM provider is transforming and shaping the Air Force, and how FM professionals, leading balanced lives, are respected, appreciated, admired, and sought after for their strategic and analytical capabilities.

Then later, hopefully over drinks, I want to hear us reminisce about data calls and spreadsheets and pay cases and vouchers and unauditable financial statements. And then overhearing us, those who are the FMers of the day will turn to us and say, "What are data calls? We don't do that anymore...."

FM--Fighting the War on Terror 

Why am I continually making these points, exhorting you to change, improve, and transform? Why is it so important to create the future now, while we're so busy tending to the needs of today? Is FM really that important to the Air Force?

On those days when I think about where FM fits into it all, I'm reminded of the symbol of our Service--the Air Force Falcon.

Think about it: Our fighters and bombers form the talons, the ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance] systems make for the sharpest of vision, our airlift forces are the powerful and swift wings. But the heart that gives it life and sustains it--that's you, the financial managers of the United States Air Force.

And that's why all of this matters so much.

Folks, we are a nation at war, and our warfighters need the best that financial managers can give them.

You are doing that now, and you are creating today's history and you should be proud of that. I am! In just a moment, I'll show you some of the faces that have made that history. Among those faces are leaders like Colonel Jim Behring, Colonel Don Davis, Colonel Paul Huff, and Colonel Gary Minor. These four colonels deployed to Iraq and played a major role in putting together the financial infrastructure for a new Iraq. Working directly for the Coalition Provisional Authority, they proved that the FM community is capable of handling new and exciting operations anywhere, anytime, in support of the warfighter and our national leadership.

Winston Churchill once said, "To every man, there comes in his lifetime that special moment when he is tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique and fitted to his talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds him unprepared and unqualified for the work that would be his [or her] finest hour."

These airmen that you're about to see were ready for their finest hour. You were, too--because you helped them. The question is, will we be ready for tomorrow? We must! Help me, help us build that future and get involved in implementing our Service Delivery Model--and we'll be ready for anything!

Thank you for being here; thank you for your service. Enjoy the rest of today and the week.

The Honorable Michael Montelongo Secretary of the Air Force