Spreadsheet Hell

For his part, Fisher of Delta Connection says that once Sarbanes-Oxley compliance is well in hand, he hopes to explore technology that will streamline the company's approach to payroll and employee-records management. "This is the biggest, most complex cobweb of systems for us," he says.

That one-thing-at-a-time approach would seem at odds with the transformative visions that many software vendors are peddling. But what can look slow and steady in the near term can in fact be fairly revolutionary: is there a finance department in existence that doesn't rely on the Internet as an all-purpose technological backbone? Could one have said the same five years ago? Even in the near term, the innovation gap seems far more likely to shrink than to grow. The number of companies that will adopt newer forms of finance IT will be so large, why, you'd need a spreadsheet to track them all.

Don Durfee is research editor of CFO.

After the Cost-Cutting, More Cuts

While many CFOs have an IT wish list and seem interested in new technologies, a recent survey from Booz Allen Hamilton suggests that purse strings will remain securely fastened. Asked about their top overall priorities, fully 85 percent of the 156 CFOs surveyed cited cost-cutting for general and administrative services — a.k.a. overhead — including IT, human resources, and core accounting and finance functions. In fact, despite the prolonged economic slump and the substantial cost-cutting it has already entailed, only 3 percent said they've cut overhead costs as much as possible.

While survey respondents pointed to a number of different strategies for making further cuts, there was little evidence of a slash-and-burn approach. With the easy cuts having been made, companies now believe they'll need to combine cuts to nonessential services with other strategies, including standardization, restructuring, and altered relationships with — and expectations of — the business units that consume many of those services.

The survey turned up plenty of evidence that IT strategy will play a key role in such plans — and maybe a number of roles. For one, Booz Allen found that success in cutting overhead costs can hinge in large part on mastering the complexity of IT. Companies that said "managing a patchwork of different systems" is their top IT challenge were almost unanimous in labeling themselves underperformers in overhead reduction, while fewer than half of the self-described leaders in cost-cutting said managing a hodgepodge of systems is a top IT concern.

In some cases, an investment in IT may help business units become more self-sufficient. One of the appeals of business intelligence and CPM technology is that they can enable business managers to do their own analyses based on a common set of data. If the technology lives up to its promise, business units can satisfy some of their own requests, allowing finance to do more with less. "A lot of what finance does today are things that people would do themselves if they had the tools," says John Van Decker, a vice president at Meta Group Inc.

That's been a perennial complaint, of course, but with tools improving and the pressure on companies to operate more efficiently in no way abating, this could be a classic case of spend a dime to make a dollar. —D.D.

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