Hacking the public CFO's office: how technological and social change can transform the way the public's business gets done.

• Author: Haisler, Dustin
• Position: Chief financial officers - Cover story

Hacking the CFO's office may sound threatening, but it doesn't have to be. Hacking isn't something that has to happen to you--although it will if you don't do it for and to yourself. (More on that later.) Don't be alarmed by the word "hack." It doesn't just mean breaking into computers or computer networks. (1) For chief finance officers (CFOs), hacking means always looking for ways to improve the organization's ability to be a more effective steward of scarce taxpayer resources, solve intractable problems, address new challenges, and take advantage of emerging opportunities.

Hacking refers to an inelegant but effective solution to a computing problem, a technique or short cut to solving everyday problems (a life hack), or a collective positive action to create fast, effective solutions in a community (a civic hack). The civic hack, of course, is the point here. CFOs need to be hacking their own organizations and should think of themselves as the collaborator and hacker in chief.

To state the obvious, finance defines the CFO's role, and it is used to control the organization, to nudge behaviors forward and create incentives for doing things differently. Moreover, the CFO's office gave rise to modern information technology (IT) in the public sector, when the complexity of government finances overwhelmed manual and mechanical means of accounting, and large-scale computing became necessary. In that sense, those early mainframes and data centers were an important and historic hack. This early automation began to decrease the level of effort needed to manage government finances and increase the degree of impact. In governments across the United States and Canada, government technology efforts often feel like they are spread too thin and lagging behind. Over time, this can and will be a real problem--one that hacking can help.

WHAT HACKING MEANS

Malicious hacks notwithstanding, the hack is an inflection point in a virtuous ecosystem that brings formerly disparate players--for example, government (and the open data it holds) and the transparency movement (citizen coders, non-profit advocacy groups, and civic startups)--together around a common issue or concern. The hack is an episodic and purposeful form of crowdsourcing through which a group of people (the crowd) share the distribution of work (the sourcing).

In 2014, the National Day of Civic Hacking (an event to encourage citizens from around the world to work together with local, state, and federal governments as well as private-sector organizations to improve their communities through technology) attracted citizen coders and other community-minded people to 118 events in 97 cities. A notable example from past efforts of this type is the online Open Checkbook application in Palo Alto, California, the basis of the city's financial transparency platform and the direct result of a local hackathon. (2)

EVOLVING TECHNOLOGY

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