Technology: Page 38

  • Robotic process automation as an innovation improving productivity, reliability and repeatability in systems
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    BPO: Is Wider Better?

    Financial and accounting business process outsourcing “is becoming the territory of a handful of large global services providers,” says Shruti Yadav, an analyst at International Data Corp. in Framingham, Massachusetts. F&A BPO — though an awkward abbreviation — has made a name for itself as i...

    By John Edwards • Feb. 21, 2006
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    Going All Out

    Last year, Whirlpool Corp. found itself in a dilemma. The $13.2 billion home-appliance manufacturer hadn’t invested enough over the years to keep its human-resources department functioning efficiently, and the cost of updating it was going to be daunting. The technology alone would have cost mill...

    By John P. Mello Jr. • Feb. 15, 2006
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    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
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    Simpler Servers for Small Business

    According to Framingham, Massachusetts-based research firm IDC, 15 percent of medium-sized businesses have adopted Linux, but among smaller (and, you’d imagine, nimbler) companies, that figure is just 7 percent. Part of the difference is explained by the number of computer servers at these busine...

    By John P. Mello Jr. • Feb. 14, 2006
  • Robotic process automation as an innovation improving productivity, reliability and repeatability in systems
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    Pay-per-view ERP

    Managers at Thermos Inc. faced a painful choice. Stick with the old, outdated enterprise resource planning program and risk losing highly prized customers, or switch to a new, 21st-century ERP system and risk alienating the company’s only in-house source of tech support.If you think there’s a bac...

    By John Edwards • Feb. 14, 2006
  • Robotic process automation as an innovation improving productivity, reliability and repeatability in systems
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    Outsourcing Frontier: Yanks Need Apply

    Not content with siphoning jobs from the United States, India has started cherry-picking its worker pool, too. The market for expatriates in India has heated up appreciably in the last three months or so, says Art Flew, CEO of Hyderabad-based business process outsourcing company Karvy Global Serv...

    By John P. Mello Jr. • Feb. 7, 2006
  • Robotic process automation as an innovation improving productivity, reliability and repeatability in systems
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    Monumental Challenge

    It’s often said that information technology is a field that lives and (too often) dies by the project. Even when a project isn’t dying, it may be weak, sickly, or on life support. Large IT initiatives are difficult to manage and can prove disappointing, if not disastrous. Some progress has been m...

    By Russ Banham • Feb. 7, 2006
  • Robotic process automation as an innovation improving productivity, reliability and repeatability in systems
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    GM to Outsource $15 Billion in Contracts

    Officials at General Motors Corp. announced plans to spend about $15 billion over the next five years to outsource information technology (IT) activities, in what many believe to be one of the largest IT outsourcing efforts ever.The financially beleaguered auto giant awarded contracts to EDS, Hew...

    By Stephen Taub • Feb. 2, 2006
  • Robotic process automation as an innovation improving productivity, reliability and repeatability in systems
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    Maps for Apps

    For the past several years IT departments the world over have been tightening their belts. But before you can rein in costs, you must gain control over them, and that can be difficult.Enter consultants from Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Sapient Corp., who have developed what they call the Applic...

    By Connie Winkler • Jan. 31, 2006
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    Diminishing Returns for Outsourcing?

    Outsourcing has become so common among U.S. companies that the question no longer seems to be whether to engage in the practice but how far to extend it. The answer, according to the conventional wisdom, is the farther the better. The benefits seem obvious indeed. To the extent a company can cut ...

    By Ronald Fink • Jan. 30, 2006
  • Robotic process automation as an innovation improving productivity, reliability and repeatability in systems
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    FTC Fines ChoicePoint $15 Million

    Consumer data broker ChoicePoint Inc. has agreed to pay $15 million to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that its security and record-handling procedures violated consumers’ privacy rights and federal laws.Without admitting any wrongdoing to the FTC, the company will pay $10 million in civi...

    By Stephen Taub • Jan. 26, 2006
  • Robotic process automation as an innovation improving productivity, reliability and repeatability in systems
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    Most Organizations Had Cyber Breaches

    Nearly 9 out of 10 organizations were hit with computer-security incidents last year, according to the FBI’s latest Computer Crime Survey, which found that 20 percent of those experiencing attacks had at least 20 of them.Total losses amounted to $32 million. Viruses and worms cost the most, accou...

    By Stephen Taub • Jan. 20, 2006
  • Robotic process automation as an innovation improving productivity, reliability and repeatability in systems
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    IT Directions ’06

    First the bad news: Even if you’re confident that your organization has mastered Sarbanes-Oxley requirements and absorbed the worst of the costs, you still face a growing list of compliance demands that will likely consume a big chunk of your IT (and other) budgets, and continue to command major ...

    By Bob Violino • Jan. 17, 2006
  • Robotic process automation as an innovation improving productivity, reliability and repeatability in systems
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    Hackers Find Backers

    Large organizations should prepare themselves for more-clever and more-targeted attacks against their security infrastructures this year. That’s the one thing law-enforcement officials, security experts, and industry executives agree on. Everything else — from the proper way to assess damages aft...

    By John McPartlin • Jan. 11, 2006
  • Robotic process automation as an innovation improving productivity, reliability and repeatability in systems
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    The Cost of Mobile Working

    Once confined to a small group of highly mobile professionals, mobile network access technology is becoming commonplace, even a fixture, in contemporary business life. As the contribution of knowledge workers and professionals becomes increasingly important to businesses — and as competitive pres...

    By 10Rule • Jan. 10, 2006
  • Robotic process automation as an innovation improving productivity, reliability and repeatability in systems
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    Wireless Wonderland

    When Bill Tara, CIO of American Medical Response Inc., the country’s largest private medical-transportation company, needed help rolling out mobile enterprise applications to his company’s 18,000 employees, no one answered his 911 call. None of the company’s systems integrators, wireless carriers...

    By John McPartlin • Dec. 21, 2005
  • Robotic process automation as an innovation improving productivity, reliability and repeatability in systems
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    Power to the Little People

    If the first decade of E-commerce found companies exploring fresh possibilities, the next will be marked by their growing understanding of a critical new reality: customers are now in control. From their vastly increased ability to compare prices and service levels of various competitors to their...

    By Russ Banham • Dec. 14, 2005
  • Robotic process automation as an innovation improving productivity, reliability and repeatability in systems
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    Left to Their Own Devices

    In April 2004, we reported on the growing — some would say rampant — use of unauthorized technologies in the workplace (see “Monsters Inc.“). The list of these so-called rogue technologies included flash drives, digital cameras, and MP3 players.The problem: employees were plugging these swell gad...

    By Elaine Appleton Grant • Dec. 7, 2005
  • Robotic process automation as an innovation improving productivity, reliability and repeatability in systems
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    The Suite Lowdown

    While prolonged viewing of a diagram of Oracle Corp.’s $5.8 billion double-dummy acquisition of Siebel Systems Inc. may induce vertigo, an aerial picture of the megadeal’s impact on software purchasing is equally unsettling.The fact is, few decisions give corporate executives more worries than bu...

    By Russ Banham • Dec. 6, 2005
  • Robotic process automation as an innovation improving productivity, reliability and repeatability in systems
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    Risk Denial from the Top?

    Senior finance executives affirm that information technology — computer hardware, software, systems, applications, networks, and other related services — plays a central role in executing business strategy. But it is as much the implementation of technology — the delivery of the right solution ta...

    By CFO Editorial Staff • Nov. 30, 2005
  • Robotic process automation as an innovation improving productivity, reliability and repeatability in systems
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    All Boxed Up

    When was the last time you consulted the owner’s manual for your refrigerator or toaster oven? Exactly. Kitchen appliances are both familiar and simple (well, usually). They do their jobs unobtrusively, and they require no tinkering. If only things were that simple in the IT world.Increasingly, t...

    By Doug Bartholomew • Nov. 16, 2005
  • Robotic process automation as an innovation improving productivity, reliability and repeatability in systems
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    Old Computer, New Woes for Freddie Mac

    Freddie Mac has announced a revision of previously reported financial results. The embattled mortgage-finance company, fresh off a major accounting scandal, will reduce net income for the first half of 2005 by about $220 million, to $1.4 billion.For a company trying to rebuild its credibility, th...

    By Stephen Taub • Nov. 8, 2005
  • Robotic process automation as an innovation improving productivity, reliability and repeatability in systems
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    NicoElNino. Retrieved from Shutterstock.
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    Small and Smaller

    For years, PC makers have trumpeted the coming mobile-computing revolution. In that lilac-scented world, tanned, svelte executives tote around feathery-light, powerful notebook computers, accessing E-mail and office files from bullet trains and Michelin-recommended hotels.A lovely vision, but one...

    By Esther Shein • Nov. 2, 2005
  • Robotic process automation as an innovation improving productivity, reliability and repeatability in systems
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    SEC: Firm Traded on Stolen PR

    The Securities and Exchange Commission charged an Estonian financial services firm and two of its employees with conducting a fraudulent scheme that allowed them to trade on information contained in press releases before they were released.Specifically, the commission charged that the firm of Loh...

    By Stephen Taub • Nov. 1, 2005
  • Robotic process automation as an innovation improving productivity, reliability and repeatability in systems
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    Customer Disservice?

    Bigotry and xenophobia are traits not usually associated with San Francisco, which surely ranks among the most diverse, tolerant, and cosmopolitan cities in the world. But when consultant Tom Weakland appeared on a San Francisco radio talk show early this summer to discuss the globalization of cu...

    By Norm Alster • Oct. 26, 2005
  • Robotic process automation as an innovation improving productivity, reliability and repeatability in systems
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    The Desktop Has Two Faces

    CFOs with a few miles on them no doubt remember the days of fretting about computing standards. Back then, the big question for finance chiefs was where to place their bets. Macs or PCs? Unix or OS/2? Thin client or fat client?For most purchasers of corporate computers, those weighty decisions la...

    By Elaine Appleton Grant • Oct. 5, 2005