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

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

Explore the Trendline➔

The 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spreadsheets: Cross Referencing Between Worksheets

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.Reader Walter J. wins a copy of the new third edition of Learn Excel 2007-2010 from MrExcel for his...

By Bill Jelen • July 14, 2011

Spreadsheets: Suppressing Cells in a Pivot Table

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.Victoria C. wins a copy of Pivot Table Data Crunching for her question, “In pivot tables, how do I ...

By Bill Jelen • July 7, 2011

Cybergeddon: Mark Russinovich’s “Zero Day”

In cybersecurity circles, Mark Russinovich, the top technical gun in Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform group, is a pretty famous guy. In 2005 he discovered a program that Sony deployed secretly to prevent users from copying its CDs. Unfortunately, the program contained a vulnerability that...

By David Rosenbaum • July 6, 2011

Cybergeddon: Mark Russinovich’s “Zero Day”

In cybersecurity circles, Mark Russinovich, the top technical gun in Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform group, is a pretty famous guy. In 2005 he discovered a program that Sony deployed secretly to prevent users from copying its CDs. Unfortunately, the program contained a vulnerability that...

By David Rosenbaum • July 6, 2011

Spreadsheets: Forecasting Seasonal Data with Excel

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.During my Forecasting and Planning Webcast on June 24, I was demonstrating how to use straight-line...

By Bill Jelen • June 29, 2011

CFO vs. CIO: Endgame in the Cloud

A May survey of 344 senior financial executives revealed that in 45% of organizations, the CFO “makes or leads IT investment strategy.” According to the study, by Gartner and Financial Executives International, this represents a trend toward growing CFO IT leadership — driven, perhaps, by the fac...

By David Rosenbaum • June 28, 2011

Spreadsheets: Eliminate the Pivot Table Blank Row Snag

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.Reader Joe S. wins a copy of Pivot Table Data Crunching for this week’s question: “I use pivot tabl...

By Bill Jelen • June 22, 2011

Spreadsheets: All about Zoom

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.Reader Tom H. wins a copy of Slaying Excel Dragons for his question, “Is there a way to change the ...

By Bill Jelen • June 15, 2011

Spreadsheets: Split Columns at Each Space

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.Grace B. wins a copy of Learn Excel 97-2007 from CFO and MrExcel for her question: “Our accounting ...

By Bill Jelen • June 1, 2011

The Price Is (More) Right

After several years of cutting costs to the bone, many companies are reacting to today’s soaring energy and commodity prices with trepidation: they would like to raise prices to maintain margins, but aren’t sure when — or if — they can successfully pass along increased costs to customers.That may...

By Russ Banham • June 1, 2011

Offshore Outsourcing: For Smaller Companies, Too

When music-subscription service Rhapsody spun out of former joint-venture parents RealNetworks and MTV Networks early last year, vice president of finance Michael McGinn faced a major challenge: building a finance team from scratch to support a business that was well under way. “Things needed to ...

By Alix Stuart • May 25, 2011

Offshore Outsourcing: For Smaller Companies, Too

When music-subscription service Rhapsody spun out of former joint-venture parents RealNetworks and MTV Networks early last year, vice president of finance Michael McGinn faced a major challenge: building a finance team from scratch to support a business that was well under way. “Things needed to ...

By Alix Stuart • May 25, 2011

Spreadsheets: Set Up a Subtotal-Filter Combo in a Flash

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.Reader Alan B. wins an autographed copy of Learn Excel 97-2007 from CFO.com and MrExcel for his sug...

By Bill Jelen • May 25, 2011

Getting Off the Paper Trail

Since the dawning of digitization, the paperless office has been a holy grail, glimpsed from afar. Wouldn’t it be nice to rid ourselves of all that clutter while saving money and trees? One sometimes imagines the grail is within reach. For example, according to the American Forest & Paper Ass...

By David Rosenbaum • May 17, 2011