Technology: Page 22
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Why IT Couldn’t Save American Airlines
Last week’s announcement that American Airlines (AA) was filing for bankruptcy protection is both personally and professionally disappointing to me. But not surprising. I started my post–Air Force career at AA, and the late Max Hopper — the airline’s former senior vice president of IT, one of the...
By Larry Tieman • Dec. 7, 2011 -
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Cost Surprises Hidden by Clouds
One of the value propositions ballyhooed by vendors for moving from on-premise computing to the public cloud is that the latter will reduce your IT costs. This may or may not be the case.In Why the Cloud Can Be Like a Subprime Mortgage, I touched on the lure of the low-entry cost of public cloud ...
By Rob Livingstone • Dec. 5, 2011 -
Explore the Trendline➔
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TrendlineThe CFO Strategy for Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence’s impact on the office of the CFO continues to evolve, and finance chiefs must be aware of the opportunities it will create for growth.
By CFO.com staff -
NicoElNino. Retrieved from Shutterstock.
The Gadget Inspector’s Holiday Gift Guide
Take a Bunch of Tablets and Call Me in the MorningThe big player coming out of Camp Amazon this season is the Kindle Fire ($199), its 7-inch color tablet, but Amazon.com also has two very strong e-Reader options in the Kindle Touch ($99) and its base model Kindle ($79).When I finally got my hands...
By Ben Radlinski • Nov. 29, 2011 -
NicoElNino. Retrieved from Shutterstock.
Is a Perpetual Software License Such a Bad Thing?
ERP giant SAP announced this month the completion of its acquisition of Crossgate, a provider of cloud integration services. Last month, Oracle bought RightNow Technologies, a customer experience cloud company, and IBM purchased Platform Computing, a software company specializing in managing clou...
By David Rosenbaum • Nov. 17, 2011 -
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Is It Safe? The 7 Principles of Cloud Security
Some of you may remember Marathon Man, starring Lawrence Olivier as the evil Nazi dentist Dr. Christian Szell and Dustin Hoffman as a graduate history student nicknamed Babe. Szell has come to New York from his South American jungle hideaway to retrieve a cache of diamonds, but he’s not sure he w...
By Timothy Chou • Nov. 4, 2011 -
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Four Strategies to Get More Out of IT
When it comes to IT, we’re leaving money on the table.The demand for IT (the perceived need for new capabilities to improve the business’s performance and/or its competitive position) far outstrips the available supply (the capacity — including money, staff, and tools — to fulfill IT demand). Exe...
By Susan Cramm • Oct. 19, 2011 -
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Your CIO, Your Problem
Why do CFOs so often wonder if the bang will be worth their IT investment buck? Why does a visit to IT typically involve hitting the “B” on the elevator or driving to another building? Why do you have a harder time hiring, managing, and relating to your CIO than to any other executive? I don’...
By Martha Heller • Oct. 7, 2011 -
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Performance, Location, Security, Business Model: Your Choice
By now, you’ve no doubt heard about public and private clouds. Are the differences between them the same as those between a public (Pebble Beach) or private (Augusta National) golf course? They’re both pretty nice. Between a public (Berkeley) or private (Stanford) education? They’re both pretty...
By Timothy Chou • Oct. 5, 2011 -
NicoElNino. Retrieved from Shutterstock.
My Tablet Goes to Work
I have a tablet, an Asus Transformer. I’ve had it for about two months, and I love it. It lets me surf the web and keep up with my friends on Facebook and Google+, and I’m currently tapping my way through book one of A Song of Ice and Fire, A Game of Thrones. The Transformer has proven to be a st...
By Ben Radlinski • Sept. 29, 2011 -
NicoElNino. Retrieved from Shutterstock.
Packing Up Your Legacy Data to Move to the Cloud
Fact: People never really know how much stuff they have until it’s time to begin packing it all up to move. Similarly, most organizations never really know how much legacy data they have (or where and what it is) until it’s time to move it from one platform to another. This is even a bigger chall...
By Rob Livingstone • Sept. 28, 2011 -
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IT: Business Asset or Strategic Liability? Your Choice.
As long as People Express (PE) had only six airplanes and was just offering $23 flights between Buffalo and Newark or Norfolk and Newark, the major airlines made no competitive response. But in 1983, PE began to compete directly with American Airlines (AA), United Airlines (UA), and Northwest Air...
By Larry Tieman • Sept. 27, 2011 -
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Walk Like a Start-up with Less Capex, More Opex
At a recent conference I attended, one of the speakers observed that venture capitalists (VCs) are rejecting any and all business plans that include capital spending for IT. Their rationale is all about focus and flexibility. “Pay as you go” IT (enabled through cloud services such as software-as-...
By Susan Cramm • Sept. 15, 2011 -
NicoElNino. Retrieved from Shutterstock.
Beyond Corporate Performance Management
A businessman is cruising in a hot air balloon. He’s lost.He descends, looking for help.He spots a man standing in a field, descends a bit further, and yells: “Hey! Can you tell me where I am?”The man responds, “You’re about 30 feet above a field.”The businessman says, “Oh, you must be an IT guy....
By David Rosenbaum • Sept. 14, 2011 -
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How Low Cost Is That Low-Cost Cloud?
Today’s Cloud feeding frenzy has been fuelled by heady promises of low costs, almost instant functionality and, ultimately, IT Nirvana.It’s those putative lower costs, of course, that make most CFOs sit up and pay attention. But if the primary driver behind your Cloud initiatives is to reduce IT ...
By Rob Livingstone • Sept. 8, 2011 -
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Who’s Screwing Up Financial IT ROI? You Are
A recent survey on finance technology conducted by the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), an advisory to senior executives, makes for some deeply disturbing reading. Although IT budgets in finance rose by 12% over the past two years, only 24% of the controllers surveyed reported seeing a positive r...
By David Rosenbaum • Aug. 31, 2011 -
NicoElNino. Retrieved from Shutterstock.
Six Ways to Move to the Cloud
I’ve been in a lot of meetings that begin with some executive saying, “We’re trying to figure out how to move to the cloud. How do we do that?” Sounds like there should be a simple answer, doesn’t it? In fact, the answer is fairly simple; it’s the question that’s complex. What does it mean to “mo...
By Timothy Chou • Aug. 30, 2011 -
NicoElNino. Retrieved from Shutterstock.
That New Big Data Magic
Back in the 1980s, American Airlines (AA) was partnered with British Airways (BA), and AA’s marketing head wanted to know how many of the airline’s gold card members, its most profitable customers, were flying BA rather than AA. Larry Tieman, then a managing director in IT at AA, dove into the ma...
By David Rosenbaum • Aug. 29, 2011 -
NicoElNino. Retrieved from Shutterstock.
What Kind of Smart Phone Are You?
Smart phones, having firmly established themselves in the consumer market, are now finding their way into the hands of finance executives who are using them for work. Three major contenders are worth comparing. Two of them (RIM’s BlackBerry and Apple’s iPhone) feature proprietary hardware and sof...
By Ben Radlinski • Aug. 26, 2011 -
NicoElNino. Retrieved from Shutterstock.
Pay-As-You-Go Only Works If You Know Where You’re Going
The subscription model is the core, the very heart of cloud computing’s value proposition.For CFOs, that model is almost irresistibly seductive, especially contrasted with the traditional on-premise, perpetual-license IT model. Not to mention that the on-premise approach is often associated with ...
By Rob Livingstone • Aug. 23, 2011 -
NicoElNino. Retrieved from Shutterstock.
Why the Cloud Can Be Like a Subprime Mortgage
Given that cloud computing is at the peak of the Gartner Hype Cycle, now is a good time to pause, take off the oxygen mask, draw calm breath, and reflect on the view from the top of hype mountain.Almost every aspect of the IT industry has been exposed to the cloud in one form or another. Indeed, ...
By Rob Livingstone • Aug. 1, 2011 -
NicoElNino. Retrieved from Shutterstock.
Who’s There?
The opening line of Hamlet — “Who’s there?” — establishes the play’s theme of the uncertainty of identity, who and what anyone really is at any given point in time. Something was rotten in Shakespeare’s Denmark, but the challenge of authenticating identity is no less urgent, and complicated, for ...
By David Rosenbaum • July 20, 2011 -
NicoElNino. Retrieved from Shutterstock.
Who’s There?
The opening line of Hamlet — “Who’s there?” — establishes the play’s theme of the uncertainty of identity, who and what anyone really is at any given point in time. Something was rotten in Shakespeare’s Denmark, but the challenge of authenticating identity is no less urgent, and complicated, for ...
By David Rosenbaum • July 20, 2011 -
NicoElNino. Retrieved from Shutterstock.
Spreadsheets: Filtering a Pivot Table with a Formula
Editor’s Note: To read more about spreadsheets, share a tip with other readers, or suggest a topic for Bill Jelen to cover in an upcoming column, click here to visit CFO.com’s Spreadsheet Tips Page.Robert L. wins a copy of Excel Gurus Gone Wild for his question, “How can you change a pivot table ...
By Bill Jelen • July 20, 2011 -
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Spies Like You?
The days when a company could simply un-friend social media — hiding it behind a firewall so employees couldn’t access it — are disappearing faster than yesterday’s “Trending Now” topics on Twitter.With an estimated 70% of social-media use coming from mobile devices like smartphones, and new onli...
By Josh Hyatt • July 15, 2011 -
NicoElNino. Retrieved from Shutterstock.
Now You See (Some of) It
ShoreTel CFO and senior vice president Mike Healy vividly recalls the one time in his four years with the company when it missed its quarterly revenue forecast. “It wasn’t a big miss,” says Healy, “but our stock went from $13 to $6 in one day.”The fact that it was the last month of 2007 didn’t he...
By David Rosenbaum • July 15, 2011
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