rewind: A look back at GFR in April 1999.

• Position: REWIND

The April 1999 issue of Government Finance Review started off with an editorial by Timothy H. Riordan, then-director of finance for the City of Cincinnati, Ohio. (Riordan went on to become the deputy city manager for Cincinnati and then city manager of the City of Dayton, Ohio, the role from which he retired in 2015.)

It's always interesting to go back and look at past predictions for the future. Riordan's editorial was far-reaching: "When historians write about this period 50 years hence, they will talk about a period similar to the start of the Industrial Revolution. They will view it as a period in which major discontinuities in the normal way of doing business occurred and caused innovation, dislocation, and a rearrangement of winners and losers." It hasn't been 50 years yet, obviously, but the events of 2020 especially prove this ambitious opening statement to be dead-on.

Narrowing the scope to our current timeframe, Riordan stated, "The successful financial leader of the next 20 years will demonstrate time-tested personal characteristics and use those characteristics to manage the four major forces affecting public financial management." These forces were character, technology skills, economic development skills, and human resource skills.

Character. Strength of personal character was defined as "honesty, integrity, trust-building, and common sense." The details could have come directly from GFOA's 2020 Code of Ethics: "The financial leader must demonstrate integrity, credibility with a variety of audiences, and common sense. The financial manager has always served as buffer, broker, or translator, helping to build trust between the public policy world and the more arcane financial world. To do that successfully requires the basic values in addition to knowledge of public finance."

Technology skills. The real productivity gains, he predicted, were yet to come. "Eventually, all internal finance transactions will start with electronic document processes. That information will be transformed to, for example, an electronic date interchange-based purchase order sent to the vendor, who after delivering the product will electronically send the invoice for electronic signature/approval and will receive an electronic payment."

Economic...