Public Dollars Transformation. (Book Reviews).(Book Review)

William R. Phillips, Bonnie L. Brown, Andrew C. West, and C. Morgan Kinghorn

Mansfield, Ohio: PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (224 pp)

A recent survey of private sector managers and general managers revealed that 95 percent do not regard the chief financial officer as a business partner. Seventy percent of the CFOs themselves felt the same way. Although this survey focused on the private sector, the stereotypical view of the finance officer as a "bean counter" or "police officer" is alive and well in the public sector. Many public sector CFOs spend the majority of their time processing transactions, maintaining records, and dealing with audits. Although these functions are vital to an organization, they often isolate finance officers from their colleagues and from key decisions. William R. Phillips, Bonnie L. Brown, Andrew C. West, and C. Morgan Kinghorn of PWC Consulting set out to break this traditional view of the federal CFO in Public Dollars Transformation: Common Sense for 21st Century Financial Managers.

Public Dollars Transformation is organized around the premise "that the highest value that financial management can add to an organization is the ability to make decisions in clear view of resource impacts." All of the chapter topics--from the rules of reliability to the entrepreneurial finance officer--tie into this central idea. For example, the authors argue that a finance officer's ability to leverage information will be impaired if that information is inaccurate or lacks credibility. Yet accurate financial information is worthless if it is not leveraged to improve organizational performance. The authors back up their claims with real-world examples, survey data, and effective visual aids.

The first few chapters address the need for finance officers to proactively engage their traditional role as purveyors of financial information. Although these chapters are appropriate and interesting, the remaining chapters are the most useful and challenging. These chapters focus on how CFOs can leverage financial information to improve business practices. Recognizing that commercial off-the-shelf enterprise software can help finance officers integrate information, the authors devote an entire section of Chapter 3 to enterprise technologies, including discussions on enterprise resource planning software and on the importance of developing an enterprise architecture. Finance officers unfamiliar with these systems will find this section a simple, easy-to-understand introduction to enterprise technology.

Chapters 6 and 7 define the new, proactive CFO. The authors urge finance officers to look for new ways to improve operations in their organizations. A renewed emphasis on performance-based management, which links investments to results, offers an opportunity for CFOs to become integral players and decision makers in their organizations. The authors provide a number of convincing reasons ...