An update from Steve Murphy - January 2023

January 31, 2023

We’re halfway through fiscal year 2023 (FY23), and you’ve accomplished a lot already. We’re on track for another great year in Finance, thanks to What you are doing and How you are doing it. 

As a reminder, these are our overall FY23 goals for Finance: 

  • Provide high quality, reliable day-to-day services, information, and advice. 
  • Strengthen compliance and internal controls, and build effective, supportive, mutually reinforcing infrastructures for both training and compliance monitoring. 
  • Provide strong stewardship for and improve the financial performance of the University, while advancing the President’s Academic Priorities. 
  • Build a positive work environment. 

By now you should have had a mid-year check in meeting with your supervisor – or have one scheduled in the near future. It’s important to step back and have a conversation about how the year is going. 

One of the major highlights from the first six months of FY23 is the launch of the OneFinance program announced by Jack Callahan in July. This will be a multi-year initiative. My estimate is it will be about three to four years, subject to change, because we’re still developing the multi-year plan. 

The goal of the OneFinance program is to make significant progress toward a new vision for financial management at Yale, the North Star I’ve shared with you previously in a town hall meeting: 

To enable Yale’s mission, simplify and standardize financial services in order to make life easier where everyone has a role in building a strong culture of financial integrity, insight, and stewardship of Yale resources.

The key deliverables for the project are shown below, an exciting set of building blocks that will help us make the North Star a reality:

The OneFinance team, led by Lisa Varni from Finance and Brian Rebeschi from the School of Medicine, is working hard to communicate our progress, and recently you may have seen an email with the latest of what will be periodic updates. I encourage you to read these updates to stay abreast of the progress we’re making, and equally important, I encourage you to ask questions or raise your hand if you think you can help.  

A few people have spoken up already, and their feedback contributed to the format of the program update itself, specifically, highlights of “Other noteworthy projects that have been completed that, while not part of the OneFinance program, advance the objectives of our North Star.” Take a look and see what’s mentioned in this month’s update. If you have other progress to share, please send it to the OneFinance team (onefinance@yale.edu), because we want to celebrate all of the progress toward our North Star! 

Thank you for all you are doing to achieve our goals in support of Yale’s mission – both What you have accomplished so far this year and How you’ve accomplished it. We’re on track and making great progress, and I’m excited about what we’ll be accomplishing together in the second half of the year.