The New Star of IT Cost Allocation

A holy grail for many companies is to reduce the 70% or so of their information-technology spend that is devoted to operating existing systems, thereby freeing up more resources for adding new capabilities. But the way costs are allocated across business lines and corporate functions can keep the...

By David McCann • April 28, 2010

IT’s Need for Speed

When it comes to making fundamental changes to a business, speed trumps everything, says consultant Jack Bergstrand. Indeed, the firm of which he is CEO is called Brand Velocity, for its focus on helping companies in reinvention mode accelerate their time frames.Bergstrand is no stranger to perso...

By David McCann • April 14, 2010

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

If You Build It…

No matter how much rigor a company may bring to it, building a data warehouse remains an act of faith. It can also entail a lot of pain.So what prompts a company to do it? Pain.That was the case at Impax Laboratories, which embarked on a data-warehousing project in 2006 after determining that pri...

By David McCann • April 1, 2010

The Democratic Way to Great IT

Frustration over information technology may be one of the most common attitudes among business leaders. From failed projects and systems degradation to costly downtime and data-security lapses, when it comes to IT it often seems that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, sooner or later.At th...

By David McCann • March 2, 2010

A Sense of Agreement

Don Doherty spends a fair amount of time these days doing something most CFOs don’t: cheering up his IT staff. The technology team at MI Windows and Doors is eager to implement new systems, but the budget is tight at this $200 million manufacturer, which was hit hard by the recession. “When they’...

By David McCann • March 1, 2010

Best Buys in Offshore Manufacturing

Until a few years ago, choosing an offshore manufacturing location was fairly straightforward, with finance chiefs and their fellow executives typically focused on a handful of cities in China. But with the volatility in the dollar, fluctuating transportation and commodity costs, and shifting glo...

By Kate O'Sullivan • Feb. 18, 2010

Do You Have Too Much Software?

Companies have put all kinds of costs under the microscope during the past couple of years, but one expense that is frequently missed involves software usage — or, more exactly, nonusage.According to Kathleen Brush, a turnaround professional, even software companies overlook opportunities to cut ...

By David McCann • Feb. 17, 2010

Tech CFOs See Times of Plenty

Technology-company CFOs have turned decidedly optimistic about near-term financial results. Among 100 of them polled in January by BDO Seidman, 69% said they anticipate higher sales revenue in 2010. When a similar survey was done a year ago, only 30% of finance chiefs said the same for 2009.Indee...

By David McCann • Feb. 4, 2010

A Tough Cell

Tiny details can have large impacts. Just as the proverbial kingdom was lost for want of a nail, so a finance chief could find his job in jeopardy as a result of a mistake in a spreadsheet cell. The escalating consequences of such an error, once introduced into the financial-reporting system, may...

By David McCann • Jan. 29, 2010

The IFRS-IT Connection

With international financial reporting standards set to become the new accounting regime in Canada on January 1, 2011, most public companies there are well along in the conversion process. Their experience may prove useful to U.S. companies if and when the latter are required to switch to IFRS. O...

By David McCann • Jan. 27, 2010

A World of Interest

With a so-so U.S. economy expected in 2010, many companies are looking abroad for high-growth markets and low-cost outsourcing locations. China and India are still favorite destinations, but experts say interest in Brazil and Africa is growing.The outsourcing industry roared back to life in the f...

By Kate O'Sullivan • Jan. 22, 2010

Today KPIs, Tomorrow Benchmarks?

Benchmarking a company’s finance processes has long been a source of frustration for CFOs. Although firms like APQC and Hackett Group can supply benchmarks for a corporate peer group, a company still has to come up with a picture of its own performance — an exercise that can take weeks or months ...

By David McCann • Jan. 20, 2010

Harmony in the C-Suite

CFOs and chief information officers don’t always see eye to eye, even on vital matters like risk management and cost control. But there may be more common ground between them than is typically thought.That is important, because identifying areas of agreement can create a platform for more-open di...

By David McCann • Jan. 8, 2010

Best of 2009: Technology

Like so much else in the CFO’s world last year, the use of information technology in 2009 was shaped and constrained by tight budgets. That meant, for example, that renting software-as-a-service applications became a favored strategy, largely because of their lower costs compared with traditional...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Jan. 5, 2010

Bridging the Finance-IT Gap

No one doubts that managing the funding and expense of technology operations at a Fortune 500 company is a big responsibility. In fact, it’s a puzzle why more companies don’t have a team devoted solely to overseeing the finances of the IT department.Nationwide Insurance has such a team, led by Mi...

By David McCann • Dec. 17, 2009

Tech Turnaround Ahead

Companies are continuing to clamp down on information-technology spending as the year comes to a close. But 2010 will see them make a small step toward more-robust budgets after a year of budget cuts, layoffs, and delayed projects.That’s according to consulting firm Computer Economics, which surv...

By David McCann • Dec. 16, 2009

How to Save 11% of Your IT Spend

During the economic downturn, companies have trimmed their information-technology spending by holding off on purchases and retooling existing systems to squeeze out extra efficiency. But an additional chunk of savings could be realized merely by revamping the IT-budgeting process.How much could b...

By David McCann • Dec. 14, 2009

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

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

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

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

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