ATFM episode 40: Shaping the future of defense financial management

In this episode of the "All Things Financial Management" podcast, presented by the Society of Defense Financial Management (SDFM) and Guidehouse, Tom Constable, Director of Defense Programs at Syracuse University, joins host Angel Wang to share his career journey and perspective on the evolving role of financial managers. The conversation explores how financial managers are becoming more integrated into decision-making, the importance of connecting planning through execution, and why continuous learning remains essential as the field continues to evolve.

Tom Constable's story

Yeah! Thanks for asking. So, like many people in the business, I started by joining the military and I thought I would stick around for a few years and take the college money and go back and do something else. But I really enjoyed what I saw. And as I progressed through and saw more of the Army, I went to Officer Candidate School, so I did that. And I was a field artillery officer for a while, and this has nothing to do with financial management. But when I was a financial manager, I happened to share a hallway with an old resource manager, a garrison resource manager at Fort Sill, who used to tell me stories of being a financial manager. And he told me about this program at Syracuse University, and I thought it was interesting. So, when I had a chance to select a functional area in the Army, I saw comptroller and I remembered what he had told me and I thought that would be good.

So off I went to the Syracuse University Defense Comptrollership Program, the one that is now part of what I lead here at the university, and my eyes were opened to financial management and I loved it and I took everything I could from it. And from there, it was to the Pentagon and I felt more at home than I had felt certainly anywhere up to that point. And then so I stayed there and I retired from the Army in 2008, but I stayed on, I was doing programming at the time, and I found that really interesting. But while I was doing programming, I had really, really good mentors and bosses around me. I remember a woman, Nancy, coming down the hall one day saying, “You’re coming with me.” And she literally took my ear, but she was being funny and she sat me down and she said, “This is the budget book. When you program things and you don’t tell me these things, here’s what I have to do to figure it out.”

And my eyes were opened again and I thought, “Boy, this is amazing. It’s all one story.” So the vision of planning, programming, budgeting, and execution all started coming together for me. So as I had been building POMs, suddenly I had an understanding now of what setting up a year for execution looked like and then what the impacts were to the organizations when I did things especially well on their behalf or if I just sort of made them a lower priority or something, how much that could hurt them. So I really felt like I had a good foundation from the Army staff in how to view the total end-to-end process that goes from requirements, generation, and justification all the way through expenditure of funds and even audit.

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