Software’s Temperamental Star

Tom Kelly is a believer. The CFO and chief information officer of Kardia Health Systems has seen big savings from the technology known as “software as a service,” or SaaS. Kelly has migrated nearly all of his company’s traditional business applications to these Web-enabled solutions that are usua...

By Yasmin Ghahremani • Dec. 1, 2009

CFOs to CIOs: Get Real

It’s a Catch-22 typical of the conflicts businesses have faced amid the recession. They’re looking to information-technology departments for efficiency and productivity, to be sure. But their retrenched budgets may strain their ability to make the full investment needed to meet those goals.In tha...

By David McCann • Nov. 4, 2009

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

Flat Chance

As IT director of NYK Business Systems Americas (a unit of Tokyo-based NYK, a global container-shipping company), Kurt Schubert has a list of things he’d like to do, and a list of things he needs to do.He may have to forgo both.Even essential projects, such as shoring up the redundancy and availa...

By Vincent Ryan • Nov. 1, 2009

Taking Sides over Neutrality

Given the attention that finance executives must pay to a bevy of emerging and expected regulations in banking, finance, and health care, they can be forgiven for missing what seems like an arcane technological brouhaha. But proposed rules governing so-called net neutrality could have both direct...

By Scott Leibs • Nov. 1, 2009

Office, Stationary

Many companies slashed travel spending during the past year to conserve cash. Now, even as the economy stabilizes, it looks like business travel will more often than not entail a walk to the conference room rather than a flight across the country.“As the world emerges from the recession, business...

By Alix Stuart • Nov. 1, 2009

CFOs Find It’s Nice to Share, within Limits

Large companies are getting more comfortable with using shared-services centers and are considering whether to move more finance transactions into the organizations, which can be run in-house or by a service provider.According to the consultancy The Hackett Group, a longtime proponent of the shar...

By Sarah Johnson • Oct. 27, 2009

Battle of the Clouds

There is nothing the computer industry likes better than a big new idea-followed by a big fight, as different firms compete to exploit it. “Cloud computing” is the latest example, and companies large and small are already joining the fray. The idea is that computing will increasingly be delivered...

By Economist Staff • Oct. 19, 2009

X Marks the Spot, for Errors

Tim Kingston, manager of corporate reporting at Zimmer Holdings, thought he was as prepared as he could possibly be to meet the Securities and Exchange Commission’s new XBRL requirements. Soon after the SEC mandated that large companies begin filing financial statements that include so-called int...

By Alix Stuart • Oct. 1, 2009

Changing Hats: Xerox to Pay $6.4B to Become a BPO Provider

Further enhancing the status of business-process outsourcing, Xerox announced Monday that it will pay $6.4 billion, or $63.11 per share, to expand into the BPO market by acquiring Affiliated Computer Services.The larger company — known mostly for making color printers — will use a mix of stock an...

By Sarah Johnson • Sept. 28, 2009

Dell Makes $3.9B Buy to Expand into IT-Services Business

Dell plans to buy Perot Systems for about $3.9 billion in cash to get a stronger foothold in the information technology professional-services market, and grow beyond its status as a PC-focused business.Dell has agreed to buy Perot’s outstanding Class A common stock for $30 per share. The company ...

By Sarah Johnson • Sept. 21, 2009

Rethinking Risk in Offshore Outsourcing Deals

During the past year, finance chiefs have been wearing bifocals, peering into the crevices of their companies’ various department budgets for cost savings.Offshore service providers have seen the shift first-hand since the lengths and volumes of new outsourcing contracts began shrinking — or stop...

By Sarah Johnson • Sept. 2, 2009

Heard on the Tweet

What are you doing? Millions of people worldwide now respond to that question by posting text messages on the social-networking site Twitter. For corporations, though, a more appropriate query might be, “What are you doing here?” That’s because Twitter, a free “microblogging” site on which vast n...

By Vincent Ryan • Sept. 1, 2009

XBRL: The Inside Story

After more than a decade of hype about the benefits of coding financial data with XBRL, the good news for companies now required to do so is that it seems relatively easy and inexpensive. While in the final analysis XBRL may not add much value, preparers say, at worst it is a minor inconvenience....

By David McCann • Aug. 24, 2009

Back-office Outsourcing: a Buyers’ Market

Companies considering outsourcing are now in the driver’s seat when it comes to negotiating contracts. On top of a big slowdown in the business-process outsourcing business, the offshore market is still recovering from the financial scandal at Satyam Computer earlier this year.“Satyam made everyb...

By Sarah Johnson • July 23, 2009

Taking It Personally

When Tom Goodmanson suddenly jumps up and begins waving his iPhone around — in the middle of a restaurant, say, or from the stands at a hockey game — make sure not to bother him. The CFO of Calabrio is being productive. After all, he’s familiarizing himself with the trendy smartphone because he c...

By Josh Hyatt • July 15, 2009

Financial Software’s Winners and Losers

Just about every organization has an automated accounting system. Almost as popular are technologies that facilitate financial reporting, cash management, and tax planning. But there are lots of other types of financial management applications out there to evaluate. For a small or midsized compan...

By David McCann • July 9, 2009

Speed Bumps for Early XBRL Filers, Users

A solution is said to be coming soon to a thorny technical issue that some observers had feared could temporarily render electronic financial reports tagged in eXtensible Business Reporting Language less useful than had been hoped.The issue revolves around the Financial Accounting Standards Board...

By David McCann • June 26, 2009

Internal Auditing: The 24/7 Approach

For Harrah’s Entertainment, an effort to fully automate the internal auditing process begun early last year could not have been timed more fortunately.That’s because the casino industry — already subject to stiff compliance demands from state authorities and the payment-card industry — saw its ba...

By David McCann • June 1, 2009

Oracle Strikes Again

In April, Oracle rushed in where IBM decided not to tread, offering $7.4 billion for Sun Microsystems. What will it mean for corporate IT departments? Oracle CEO Larry Ellison described a new era of “applications to disk” integration and lower costs for customers, but analysts aren’t so sure. “Or...

By Scott Leibs • June 1, 2009

Green Counters

As a company that sells playground equipment to publicly funded parks and schools, Playworld Systems risks any number of nasty falls. It has to worry not only about governmental agencies that try to protect children from toxic materials but also about community groups that are increasingly using ...

By Vincent Ryan • June 1, 2009

Offshoring’s Best Bets

India’s offshore service providers have had a tough year. With 40% of their business coming from the battered financial services sector, a devastating terrorist attack on their home soil, and a local company brought down by scandal, the once-booming business process outsourcing sector is facing c...

By Kate O'Sullivan • May 21, 2009

In Data-Tag Game, the Feds Are It

Legislation proposed last Friday holds the potential to quicken and broaden the entrenchment of eXtensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL, as a standard data format for financial documents.The Securities and Exchange Commission already had mandated that the 500 largest U.S. public companies...

By David McCann • May 20, 2009

Faint Pulse Detected in IT Spending Plans

Large-company spending on information technology, in a freefall since mid-2008, may be showing signs of bottoming out, Goldman Sachs said in a report released last week.Total IT expenditures — including not only capital purchases but also salaries, services, depreciation, and occupancy — will con...

By David McCann • May 15, 2009

Punishing Intel

The European Commission wielded its heaviest antitrust hammer against Intel, the world’s biggest chipmaker on Wednesday May 13th. The €1.06 billion ($1.45 billion) fine levied on Intel for antitrust abuses is the Commission’s biggest ever punishment and represents just under 4% of Intel’s revenue...

By Economist Staff • May 13, 2009

Reaching Deeper for Savings

You’ve outsourced, you’ve consolidated data centers, you’ve decided that the usual three-year PC refresh cycle can be stretched to four years. All well and good, but what else can you do?“Given the current economic climate, you have to be willing to think a little bit differently about things,” s...

By Thomas Hoffman • May 1, 2009