For more than 75 years, continuous evolution has been a hallmark of the American College of Military Accountants, so it is only natural that the Association’s name would also evolve to better reflect the needs of its members in the defense financial management community and the support the organization provides.
As such, ASMC is now the Society for Defense Financial Management (SDFM).
The name change comes as the nonprofit organization reflects its work serving financial management professionals in the public and private sectors, CEO Rich Brady said on Federal News Network’s SDFM podcast “The Business of Defense.”
As the association’s team dug deeper into the brand and its mission, Brady said they realized the ASMC name no longer resonated with members and was not connecting well with the future members the association was trying to attract.
“Specifically, the words ‘military’ and ‘auditor,'” he said, “because the majority of people currently working in the defense financial management profession are not military and are not auditors.”
In fact, this is the organization’s third name change: ASMC began in 1948 as the Society of Military Accountants and Statisticians, and in 1955 became ASMC.
Use of technology in financial management
“Over the next 70 years or so, as the profession of computing evolved, the ASMC continued to evolve,” Brady says. Today, ASMC members range from accountants, budgeters, and auditors to data analysts, systems engineers, and data scientists.
“This name change, this rebranding, is intended to be more inclusive of the broader diversity of the defense financial managers community, including the corporate side, the commercial side and the government side,” he said.
Brady, who served in the Marine Corps for 32 years before joining SDFM, recalled that when he joined the company in the early 1990s, the job of an auditor or financial controller included collecting, recording and reporting financial information.
“Today, we primarily have systems that do all of that, and those systems work really well and give me, as a defense financial manager, more time to do the more value-added activities for the organization: data analysis, data visualization, scenario planning, forecasting — activities that are really forward-looking for the organization and not just about historical data capture, recording and reporting all the time,” he said. “So, compared to 30 years ago, the field today is highly technical.”
SDFM’s Three Missions
As SDFM continues to evolve its programs and services to meet the needs of the Federal financial management community, its mission is three-fold:
Promotes education, training and certification of defense financial managers. “We help upskill our community so they are up to date with the latest technology and the latest ways to provide that support.” Promotes financial transformation in the defense sector. “We create a marketplace for government and private sector to collaborate, identify opportunities, create solutions, mitigate risks and ultimately create capabilities that can respond to national events.” Maintains ethical and professional standards. “The foundation of every profession is to be ethical and comply with all laws and regulations because at the end of the day, we are stewards of taxpayer money.”
It is also important that the mission and capabilities of our 18,000 personnel and our mission of supporting the warfighting requirements of our Army and the Department of Defense remain our number one priority.
“We like to say that your distance to the battlefield does not determine your contribution to the fight,” he said. “Everybody in this field — whether they’re on the front lines, in the Pentagon or a contractor in Tysons Corner — has the power to affect what happens.”
To hear the full discussion between Federal News Network Publisher Jeffrey Wolinsky and SDFM CEO Rich Brady, click the podcast play button below.
For more stories about how to succeed as a federal contractor, check out full episodes of The Business of Defense podcast.
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