Hungry Tiger, Dancing Elephant

Last June IBM held its annual investors’ day in the grounds of the Bangalore Palace, a fake Windsor Castle in India’s equivalent of Silicon Valley. Big Blue pulled out all the stops to impress the 50 or so investors and Wall Street analysts who turned up, gathering 10,000 employees to hear speech...

By Economist Staff • April 9, 2007

GAO Says SEC Must Tighten Data Security

Who regulates the regulator? When it comes to keeping sensitive Securities and Exchange Commission financial data safe, it’s the job of the Government Accountability Office to make sure the SEC is keeping its internal controls strong. A new report from the GAO, however, says that the SEC’s data s...

By Alan Rappeport • April 2, 2007

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

A Sense of Validation

Purveyors of hosted software have long touted the virtues of their distribution model. There are plenty, too. A rented application, delivered direct to desktop via the Internet, reduces the need for IT staff. Monthly subscription fees are relatively cheap — at least when compared with a million-d...

By John Edwards • April 1, 2007

Oracle vs. SAP: The Gloves Come Off

Oracle is suing SAP for allegedly hacking into its customer-support database and stealing sensitive information that it used to lure customers from its fierce rival. The accusations center on TomorrowNow, SAP’s support-services arm, one of many third-party maintenance firms chipping away at Oracl...

By Jason Karaian • March 23, 2007

Hooked by a Security Test

It’s never easy for IT managers to convince finance colleagues to sign off on new spending plans. With this in mind, security services vendor NCC sought to do its clients “a favor” with a vivid demonstration of the importance of its wares. In January, NCC sent 500 finance chiefs of London-listed ...

By Jason Karaian • March 22, 2007

No Extra Audit for XBRL, Says Cox

The Securities and Exchange Commission will use a light hand in regulating audits of XBRL, chairman Christopher Cox said at Monday’s SEC roundtable on interactive data.Cox has long championed XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language), a computer-tagged format intended to help users of financi...

By Alan Rappeport • March 19, 2007

Double-check That Check

Payments fraud, or attempted payments fraud, targeted 72 percent of organizations in 2006, compared with 68 percent in 2005, according to a new survey by the Association for Financial Professionals.Physical checks were the means of attack in at least one instance at 93 percent of the organization...

By Stephen Taub and Dave Cook • March 19, 2007

A Better Look at Your Spreadsheets

The new Microsoft Vista operating system will spread your spreadsheets in ways that aren’t available through Windows.Vista’s enhanced capabilities include the new Aero 3-D user interface, a more powerful graphics engine, and various smaller design tweaks, all of which can help you examine financi...

By John Edwards • March 16, 2007

A Little Less “R”, a Little More “D”

Piggybacking on existing intellectual property is becoming a popular means for companies to develop new products and services, and UTEK — as in “university technologies” — is looking for the best and the brightest.A specialty finance company focused on technology transfer, UTEK performs its own s...

By John P. Mello Jr. • March 12, 2007

Out of the Dusty Labs

In the waning days of the second world war, Vannevar Bush, science adviser to President Franklin Roosevelt, penned a report that served as the blueprint for what would become America’s enormously successful information-technology industry in the second half of the 20th century. With the grandiose...

By Economist Staff • March 9, 2007

Going Green

The people, places and things inside Second Life, a thriving online world with millions of residents, may be imaginary — but the power consumption of the computers that maintain the illusion is all too real. Nicholas Carr, a business writer and blogger, recently worked out that each of the 15,000...

By Economist Staff • March 5, 2007

Oracle Foretells Further Consolidation

Finance executives who are contemplating big-ticket technology purchases are casting an eye at further consolidation in the enterprise software market.Oracle announced on Thursday that it has agreed to buy Hyperion Solutions for about $3.3 billion in cash, or about $52 per share. In a statement, ...

By Stephen Taub • March 1, 2007

Junk the ”Junk Email” Law?

January 1 marked three years since the implementation of the cleverly named federal law on Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing, better known as CAN-SPAM. But according to companies that combat unwanted email, electronic spam has an even longer shelf life than the lu...

By John P. Mello Jr. • Feb. 26, 2007

A Cash Call

Some of the hottest nightclubs have a new trick for checking the identity of their VIP guests: they send an entry pass in the form of a super barcode to their mobile phones. This is scanned by the large gentleman who lifts the velvet rope. Even those who must pay to get in may need their handsets...

By Economist Staff • Feb. 16, 2007

Brain Gain

In the late 1970s, still the early years for Sophia Antipolis — France’s first “technopolis,” located near Nice on the Côte d’Azur — the science park’s founder, Pierre Laffitte, asked a top official of Chase Manhattan Bank in Chicago if he knew of any companies that might be interested in setting...

By Tony McAuley • Feb. 15, 2007

A Truce in the Sarbox Tech War?

Since companies began complying with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, one common complaint about auditor scrutiny has been loud and clear: external auditors have spent too much time on technology systems that seem unrelated to financial statements.It’s an issue that has been confusing for both sides. The ...

By Sarah Johnson • Feb. 9, 2007

Web Deux Point Zéro

“If France was more like Netvibes, things might be a lot better here,” says Tariq Krim, with disarming frankness. The website, which he runs out of Paris, is the most popular of a new class that lets users snap together individual components such as blog feeds, e-mail accounts, news headlines and...

By Economist Staff • Feb. 5, 2007

Crossing Over

Two years ago, CFO hired a new IT employee, an under-25 staffer who sat in an open cubicle. Due to the placement of his desk, the employee’s work habits were easily observed by colleagues. We watched with quiet amusement as this scion of Generation Y went about his work each day. The routine was ...

By Russ Banham • Feb. 1, 2007

Why Did the Chicken Cross the Atlantic?

Parts may be parts in the chicken business, but it’s still not common practice for U.S. restaurant chains to send large chunks of their finance and accounting (F&A) operation to India. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the year, international fast-food restaurant Church’s Chicken outsourced a...

By Theresa Sullivan Barger • Jan. 26, 2007

Peaks, Valleys, and Vistas

Around the time of the release of Windows 95, Microsoft discreetly sold a small subsidiary that made its packaging. A decade ago that decision seemed to fit with the progression of computing and the nascent internet. Although people all over the world stood in long lines to be the first to buy bo...

By Economist Staff • Jan. 22, 2007

The Check Is in the Web

KeySpan, a Brooklyn, N.Y., energy utility, had trouble paying its bills. The problem, however, was paper, not money: the company’s accounts-payable department was wallowing in paperwork, processing up to 300,000 invoices each year. It was mired in a five-day backlog and missing out on vendor disc...

By John Edwards • Jan. 17, 2007

AS5: Clarification or Confusion?

On paper, a new standard proposed by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board appears to address the concerns of companies that felt auditors spent too much time scrutinizing their internal controls and technology systems. Critics of the existing and much-contested Auditing Standard No. 2 ha...

By Sarah Johnson • Jan. 12, 2007

Even Better Than the Real Thing

Over the past two decades, videoconferencing has earned a bad reputation in the business world. Despite claims of new-and-improved technology from vendors, the act of conferencing via video hook-up has left a lot to be desired. Indeed, participating in a videoconference with the team in Tokyo is ...

By Esther Shein • Jan. 4, 2007

Follow the E-mail Trail

Ask Jeffrey J. Greenbaum, a litigation partner at Sills Cummis Epstein & Gross PC, to describe the new electronic-discovery statutes recently added to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and he doesn’t hesitate. “It’s a wake-up call for corporations,” he says, “particularly those that have ...

By John Edwards • Jan. 4, 2007

Computer on a Stick

What do Fidelity Investments, Boeing, Ameriprise Financial, the YMCA, and the U.S. Department of Transportation all have in common?Those are just a few of the organizations that suffered serious breaches of customer data or other confidential information when a company laptop was stolen or lost i...

By John P. Mello Jr. • Dec. 29, 2006