Modern Budgeting: It’s All About Your People

Governments across the country are adapting to an ever‑changing workforce that typically accounts for 70% of the overall budget.

To find and retain talent, they must provide benefits and working arrangements that compete with the private sector. At the same time, public budgets are under pressure from rising pension costs and decreasing revenues. This requires accurate, strategic, and flexible workforce planning that’s integrated with budgeting.

Why? Integrating workforce planning into the budgeting process has a host of benefits. It drives better salary projections, increases visibility into cost drivers, and reduces broad assumptions. This leads to more accurate budgeting, better resource allocation, and dramatic time savings. Combined, it gives governments the flexibility and foresight to develop the workforce needed to achieve strategic goals. When done right, this leads agencies to become high-performing organizations.

At the conclusion of the webinar, learners will be able to:

• Understand how to drive a better consolidated budgeting process that incorporates the ability to quickly manage workforce costs
• Articulate upcoming challenges and the impact to your own organization, such as being able to quickly react to economic downturns
• Advocate for the value of being able to accurately and quickly respond to workforce cost changes and provide high quality analysis of the impact of fluctuating costs

Speakers: 

Caitlin Steel, CPA, MBA
Senior Director of Product Management at OpenGov
Caitlin is a product leader with experience developing modern user friendly tools that drive automation and efficiency for complex financial processes. Prior to working to develop these solutions she spent over 20 years in Finance and Accounting where she gained valuable in depth knowledge of how companies handle budgeting, accounting and finance. Caitlin is responsible to ensure our products meet customers needs, are technically accurate and meet best practices in the government sector. She also serves as a volunteer member of the GFOA Budget Book review team.

Scott Coble
Director of Product for OpenGov
Prior to his role at OpenGov, Scott served as the Manager of Process and Technology in the Office of Management and Budget for Montgomery County, Maryland. While there, he lead a team that built a national award winning budget application called BASIS which replaced numerous failing legacy and ERP budget systems. BASIS revolutionized the budget process (Operating and Capital) in Montgomery County and saved the jurisdiction substantial time, effort and money. Mr. Coble has extensive knowledge and experience in both the private and public sectors, serving in a number of different capacities including budget management, software engineering, information security, project management and graphic/web design. Over the last 20 years Scott has worked for Fortune 500 companies (General Electric | Lockheed Martin), small to mid-size businesses (The Technology Development Group | ASSYST), and as a contractor / employee for both local (Montgomery County, MD | City of Frederick, MD) and the federal government (Intelligence Community | Department Of Defense).

Scott holds a Master’s Degree in Information and Telecommunications Systems from Johns Hopkins University, a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering from Virginia Tech and a Certificate in Public Management from George Washington University.