Cfo Thought Leader

Looking back on the 28 years that he spent inside IBM’s finance function, Russ Porter notes that his career climb paralleled the evolution of FP&A inside the giant technology provider. Turn back the clock to the early to mid-1990s and, Porter tells us, many of IBM’s FP&A professionals were more or less serving as budget managers for the company’s many business units. However, in the years that followed, they began being tasked with broader, more operational duties.  “FP&A became the gearbox for the financial and operational management of each division,” explains Porter, who describes the role of IBM’s FP&A professionals as becoming more “navigational” over time. “Each week, I sat down with my general managers—we would go through all of our sales performance numbers and review which contracts were coming on and which ones were coming off,” reports Porter, recalling the routine. Along the way, Porter recalls, FP&A professionals seeking advancement within the company would need to demonstrate