Deloitte's Sam SilversSam Silvers, global leader of Deloitte's financial management practice, says that talent is now foremost on the minds of finance officers.

CM: When you speak to financial executives about the toughest challenges they face, what parts of the finance function do they talk about?

Silvers: The "four faces" is the way we see how finance adds value to an organization: the stewardship role; the operator role, which is how they operate finance; the strategist role, which is where finance plays in driving strategy; and then the catalyst role, which is where finance is involved in the execution of strategy. In all four of those sorts of faces of finance, we see opportunities, significant opportunities, that clients are kind of coming to us to talk about. CM: Can we zero-in on one area and be more specific as to what challenges clients are facing? Silvers: The stewardship role is where clients are saying, "We can't close our books. We're not sure what we're doing is right. Meanwhile, we're jumping through so many hoops just to do a quarterly close." This is a tremendous opportunity, because it's sort of a supply chain of finance, the close process. Clients go through it every month, every quarter. They generate management reporting information, they generate financial reporting information. This is a huge area that we're seeing a lot of change in. On the operator side, we're seeing clients ask a lot about, "What should our delivery model be? How do we best support the business and also handle the transactional side of finance? So, how do we really craft the right service delivery model?" CM: Does that include shared services models? Silvers: Yes, well, finance shared services has really gotten big again. I mean, it's an area about which we're getting a lot of clients who want to talk. For a few years, they sort of stayed away from it, because they weren't sure of the implications with Sarbanes. This has come back very strong for us now. The strategist role is another interesting one. We're getting a lot of clients wanting to come and kind of work with them in maybe a workshop environment to really define what value can finance play in terms of building and creating strategy, from an outward-facing standpoint, from the way the analysts measure and manage the business. The analysts have their own perspective on what they see as valuable and what a company's doing to create value. Is finance able to take that and interpret that and bring it back into the business so that everyone's making decisions based on where value is really being driven? And then the final area, talking about the catalyst role, is that we're getting asked to help set the right performance measures and help with talent management, which are initiatives that have become very big in finance.
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CM: And it's a concern of the CFO?

Silvers: There's not a CFO we talk to today who doesn't want to understand what they can do better to develop and retain talent. What we're now seeing is world-class financial organizations focusing on hiring for talent. Hiring for someone not just for doing a specific role, but, for 18 months later, where are they going to rotate in? For 36 months later, maybe they'll go out to the business and get thrown into the business, which actually helps finance be more of a catalyst, by having ex-finance folks in the business and then bringing them back into finance and having kind of a pure, formal development and deployment plan for finance professionals. CM: So, you're finding that CFOs are interested in talent management because of the challenges they face in developing their own people? Silvers: Well, it's twofold. Number one, it's the development and retention of their people. The turnover in finance is heavy. Accounting career candidates coming out of undergrad had dropped significantly for a few years because of the whole Enron and Andersen debacle. So, now you're seeing that there's just a shortage of really talented finance professionals. That's one issue. The second issue is that to really be a catalyst and peddle influence into the rest of the business, finance needs to have some of its people out in the business, and the way they do that is literally by rotating those folks into very specific roles that may in fact be hard-lined to the business and dotted-lined back into finance. So, finance gives up a little control. You know, an "If you love them, set them free" sort of mentality. CM: Is this type of rotation one of the more innovative talent management approaches being adopted within finance? Silvers: Well, there's also this mind-set shift that instead of hiring for skills, you hire really for talent, for someone who really is highly talented and maybe isn't the best reconciler of general ledger transactions, but is someone who can really drive value into the business. CM: Can you share with us some details behind a specific talent management engagement? Silvers: We had one client situation where it was sort of encouraged to have finance professionals do everything. What we've now learned is that, in order for finance to be an effective steward, they need to keep good old accounting skills relevant and actually embrace those who really want to do accounting work and not necessarily as much on the analytic side. So, we created different career tracks for those clients so that there's actually a very strong, deep career track that's as valued in this client on the analytic side as it is the accounting side.
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CM: Have offshoring options remained a big part of your discussions with CFOs?

Silvers: We're seeing plenty of organizations offshoring or nearshoring a certain piece of finance. Remember, finance does a lot of things. They process the general ledger, they close the books, they do management reporting, they handle tax, they handle treasury. There are a lot of different processes under finance, and the answer for one process, accounts payable, may be very different than the answer for another process, management reporting. And, in fact, that's part of what we do for clients. We help them determine what makes sense for AP or AR or general ledger processing, which may be a different answer for treasury and management reporting. CM: What determines whether an engagement is truly "transformational"? Silvers: First of all, is the CFO actively involved as an executive sponsor? Second, is it a major initiative that cuts across multiple processes? Third, is there a human capital/talent management element to it? Fourth, is there some type of information technology element? It's very difficult to be purely transformational if there is not some kind of information technology already. Fifth, is it a multiyear initiative? If it's something that's going to happen in six months, it's probably not that transformational. Is it something that is not just highly visible to the CFO, the executive sponsor, but is also one of the top priorities of the CFO? CM: What are you doing within Deloitte internally to develop your own people? Silvers: First of all, there is a tremendous amount of growth in our market right now and, as a result, our professionals have a lot of career opportunities, both within and outside of Deloitte Consulting. We recognize that. So, here's what we're trying to do. Number one, we're trying to make sure that we've got the right project opportunities, that we're not pigeonholing our professionals into specific areas but, rather, that we're giving them a breadth of opportunity. Spend five or seven years with Deloitte Consulting, and you can be an adviser to a CFO, someone who really understands the issues that face finance. Second, we're looking at opportunities around training and other forms of development that are outside of client work to really continue to build and grow our consultants. Third, because of who we are at Deloitte Consulting, we have the opportunity to offer our professionals an opportunity to work on an M&A project or to work on a customer-channel strategy project or other kinds of projects that are skill-building and talent-building for these consultants but aren't necessarily pigeon-holing, if the people don't want them to be, in the finance area. We want to embrace and, in fact, do embrace that idea of allowing our professionals to do lots of other things, not just in the financial management area. That, of course, is a bit of a quid pro quo challenge, because we also look to bring our broader consulting pool into projects and a lot of our projects are resourced by folks who sit outside financial management as well as sit inside the financial management arena. (back)  
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