From the National President.

As practitioners of finance in the Department of Defense and the Coast Guard, we provide our civilian and uniformed leaders the financial parameters in which they operate. These parameters are defined by the intricate balancing of requirements and demands on national resources as appropriated by the Congress. In essence, as the word suggests, we provide certain bounds of finality to our decision makers.

As chief financial officers, comptrollers, and analysts supporting senior leaders, we ourselves must be leaders with vision and have a mindset that focuses on three critical areas: the continuous improvement of our business practices and processes, the transparent communication of results to core constituents, and the long-term development of a talented workforce. The last theme, the development of our people, is perhaps our most important obligation, for it is only when our financial management workforce is in top form--well trained and exercised, energetic and invigorated, with the knowledge and awareness that we are doing something large and important--that we can fulfill our mission.

The past 15 years have been challenging for our financial management community. The end of the cold war 15 years ago marked the beginning of the defense drawdown, affecting both the uniformed and civilian sides of the nation's defense personnel. And we experienced several rounds of base realignment and closure. A graph of our financial management community plotted against years of experience ideally should be a bell curve. But actually we find a large gap in personnel in the range of 5 to 15 years of experience. Our workforce is also aging, and as much as half of our financial management community is eligible for retirement. At the same time, we are always at risk of becoming static and require training and retraining.

We have a looming human capital crisis. We have a human talent crisis. We have a gap that must be filled. I believe we must pay attention to five critical facets of human capital if we are going to successfully mitigate this crisis: Workforce Planning, to forecast our human capital needs and chart our workforce's skills development; Professional Development, with a focus on training and professional certification; Recruiting, to reinvigorate our efforts to attract qualified people from college graduates to experienced hires and to mentor them in their new jobs; Retention, to develop a total rewards approach that uses all instruments available to incentivize great workers to stay and encourage those lagging behind to apply that little extra bit to improve performance; and Performance Management, to build competency profiles, reward programs, and flexible compensation that give the individual worker greater control and ownership over his or her career advancement.

I am pleased that this issue of Armed Forces Comptroller is dedicated to human capital. Learn from what your colleagues are doing in the other services at all levels in our financial management community to ensure that we are helping to shape the right workforce for the twenty-first century.

Richard Greco, Jr.

National President