Corporate Controllers Reinvent Themselves.

Ellen Maidman has joined FEI's Washington, D.C., office as director of strategic partners, responsible for managing and growing the organization's strategic partnership program.

Corporate controllers are moving out of their back offices and onto executive row, says research conducted by Gunn Partners and Georgia State University. The ongoing study, begun in 1997, finds controllers morphing into business partners and "people people" -- key advisors who can sit down with CEOs and CFOs to provide valuable strategic-planning insights. The Finance Leaders Research sees a shift in emphasis from auditing skills to managerial skills, including:

* More emphasis on making decisions, communicating, acting assertively and influencing others, and less on applying functional knowledge and self-management;

* Allocating more revenue to leadership and business-partnership activities and dramatically less to transaction processing; and

* Replacing the best-practice goal of reducing the finance organization's costs to less than 1 percent of revenues with the goal of optimizing resources (in other words, realizing lowest cost doesn't necessarily mean highest value).

In fact, controllers who report to business-unit heads as opposed to the CFO or another financial executive are starting to fill the business partner role. Asked which competencies they think will be most important in the future, their top three answers are communicating, acting strategically and influencing others. By contrast, controllers reporting to a financial executive rank communicating fourth, and don't even include acting strategically and influencing others among their top five.

"Because business-unit controllers are typically involved on a daily basis in helping unit managers make tough decisions that affect the bottom line, they place a high priority on acting strategically and such team-building skills as communicating and influencing others," explains Gunn Partners' Jon Scheumann. "Also, in this kind of position, the controller's first loyalty is to the business unit, not the corporate financial organization." The research reveals a schism between what the controllers cite as their top improvement priorities, with technology ranking first, and what Ehey admire most in pacesetting companies, with people ranking first and technology next to last.

"It's discouraging that so many respondents, 24 percent, rank technology as their top priority," says Scheumann. "After ERP and Y2K, you'd think technology would take a back seat. But the good news is that developing business partnerships is a close second, at 22 percent. It's also interesting that just 6 percent of respondents cite reducing costs. Perhaps this is an indicator that financial organizations are moving out of the major cost-reduction phase."

Asked to identify companies they see as pacesetrers for how the controller function should operate, respondents most frequently cite (in alphabetical order) the former AlliedSignal, Ford, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola. When asked why, their top four responses are people (talent, development), 22 percent; cost efficiency, 21 percent; business partnership capabilities, 19 percent; and "informative, insightful, impactful business information," 15 percent. Just 3 percent cite technology.

"There's a high degree of conflict between 'people' and 'technology,"' Scheumann concludes. "In terms of priorities for improvement, the financial leaders cite technology as number one and people as number five. But in terms of what they admire in leading controller organizations, they cite people as number one. We believe many finance leaders are missing the boat by undervaluing the people dimension."