From the National President.

Last month I outlined three themes critical to making financial management more effective and efficient. First, ensuring a high-performing workforce by recruiting the best people, continually developing their talents, and rewarding them through performance-based compensation. Second, improving our business practices by modernizing our business systems and instituting meaningful financial and program performance metrics to provide better data and analyses to guide resource decisions and produce auditable financial statements. Third, ensuring efficient and effective communication with all our customers and being responsive to their needs. This is crucial to demonstrate the value of our community as both a business partner and a steward of public resources.

Ultimately, all three themes are linked, providing value to each other, and through their synergy, providing greater value in the aggregate to our Departments and the American public.

The American Society of Military Comptrollers and the Armed Forces Comptroller can play an invaluable role in promoting this transformation. Both can serve as venues for the sharing of innovations, self-critiques, and lessons learned. To better each other and our work, we must always seize the opportunities that these venues afford us, striving for continuous improvement. In that spirit, I have encouraged Executive Director Hale and the editorial board of the AFC to dedicate space in the next three issues to aspects of these three themes, and I urge our readers to submit related articles and interest items for peer review.

This issue is dedicated to the theme of business practice improvement and focuses on information technology systems. A key message in Christine Wenrich's article on business systems standardization is that if we are to standardize, we must be willing to give up comfortable legacy systems. Cherie Smith's article on General Fund Enterprise Business System underscores how difficult it is to leave behind legacy systems, citing Oracles own five-year effort at systems transition. Beverly Veit asserts that a commercial off-the-shelf system can work in a complex environment: When the Navy Enterprise Resource Planning Program is fully implemented, it will replace 347 legacy systems, standardizing processes with the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the other services that subscribe to the Department's Business Enterprise Architecture. Finally, Arlene King describes the Defense Enterprise Accounting and Management System implementation by the Air Force and the United States Transportation Command.

The winter issue of AFC will continue the theme of business practice improvement and focus on the role of financial management in major defense transformation. The spring issue will focus on the role of financial management in wars and natural disasters; the summer issue will feature human capital development. Manuscripts for the two latter issues are due by January 20, 2006, and April 20, 2006, respectively.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact the Society. Enjoy this edition of AFC.

Richard Greco, Jr.

National President