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

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

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

Free Admission, No Tuition

Need a refresher course on accounting for derivatives? Thanks to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and its burgeoning OpenCourseWare program, executives can now go back to school without entering a classroom.OCW is a free educational resource that gives self-learners access to course mate...

By Gareth Goh • Dec. 29, 2006

Best of 2006: Technology

In the life of a CFO, technology falls somewhere between an enormous opportunity and an enormous migraine. There’s the perennial question of whether tech investments ever deliver their promised ROI (or whether information technology personnel even understand the term). And, in 2006, CFOs dealt wi...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Dec. 21, 2006

In a Fix

You wouldn’t know it by thecompany that he works for, but GijsHoutzagers doesn’t like to take risks, at leastnot when it comes to IT. When he joinedHolland Casino, a €681m company that runs13 casinos in the Netherlands, in 2002, hesays its PeopleSoft ERP system was “in a bitof a mess” and some bo...

By Jason Karaian • Dec. 18, 2006

Who Do You Trust?

The recent spying scandal at Hewlett-Packard garneredplenty of headlines — withgood reason. The episode, essentially aclandestine operation intended to plugpress leaks, harkened back to the tactics ofthe Nixon Administration and its infamousPlumbers unit.Despite the dubious morality andlegality o...

By Esther Shein • Dec. 18, 2006

E-Proxies to Debut in 2007

It’s sort of a paper independence day. As of July 1, 2007, companies will be able to offer proxy statements and annual reports on the Internet, thanks to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s unanimous adoption of a proposed rule. Investors partial to paper need not fear, however. The “SEC wil...

By Helen Shaw • Dec. 14, 2006

Paper Tigers

Log on to any public company’s Website and with relative ease you can access current financial data, including regulatory filings. It’s so easy, in fact, that for the past five years corporations have been campaigning to do away with the slick, costly annual reports they mail to shareholders.The ...

By Sarah Johnson • Dec. 11, 2006

Jet Blue

In August 1959, Pan American Airlinesbegan offering nonstop service from New York’s Idlewildairport to London’s Heathrow. By all accounts, thetransatlantic trip — which took about seven and a halfhours on a Boeing 707-320 — was a testament to comfort,sophistication, and gracious traveling.It’s be...

By Elaine Appleton Grant • Dec. 1, 2006

The View from the Other Side

These days, many CIOs in Asia are in a frenzy over America’s Sarbanes-Oxley Act, or Sarbox. Not Daniel Lai, chief information officer of Hong Kong subway operator MTRC. In mid-2000, he and his team started developing an enterprise-wide IT governance system that aimed to document, monitor, and con...

By Cesar Bacani • Nov. 30, 2006

Going Mobile: Is Your Data at Risk?

A new study has raised concerns that the proliferation of mobile devices could cause a surge in regulatory compliance violations and security threats. Executives are trusting PDAs and cell phones with important corporate information but aren’t safeguarding the devices properly, the study conclude...

By Stephen Taub • Nov. 27, 2006

SAS 70 Weak on Data Security: Experts

Mention the term SAS 70 in a roomful of accountants and business executives, and the conversation is likely to escalate into a chorus of disparate voices, all rendering different takes on the auditing standard.Indeed, the contentiousness surrounding the auditing standard has deep roots. Underlyin...

By Jabulani Leffall • Nov. 27, 2006

Back Office for Sale

Companies that have opted to build whollyowned shared-service centers instead of outsourcingback-office functions may be sitting on gold mines.Eager to gain scale in aconsolidating industry, serviceproviders are searching forsellers. In September, Capgemini bought 51 percent of Unilever’s Indianc...

By Don Durfee • Nov. 21, 2006

When Robots Write the News

As if having their jobs outsourced to India weren’t badenough, finance journalists now face a new threat: software programsthat can write stories in less than a second.Thomson Financial has developed a computerized systemthat “reads” earnings releases and produces news articles basedon their cont...

By Kate O'Sullivan • Nov. 20, 2006

Beyond Cash Management

Companies are calling on treasury departments to do more thananalyze cash and manage risk. In a survey conducted by the Associationfor Financial Professionals, 91 percent of respondents said the role of thetreasury department is expanding. Some of the tasks treasury is assuminginclude assisting i...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Nov. 15, 2006

How to Put Your Spreadsheet in Lockdown

Lurking inside the boxes of a spreadsheet can lie some of a company’s most precious and confidential financial data. While keeping that data secure is crucial, however, well-oiled finance departments often need to make it widely visible within their corporations.Indeed, keeping the data contained...

By John Edwards • Nov. 13, 2006

Offshoring Finance Jobs Saves Billions?

Fortune 500 companies could save $20 billion annually by sending 650,000 finance and procurement jobs overseas, according to a new Hackett Group report. By doing so, each corporation could cut costs by as much as $40 million in one year, concludes the study. In fact, the strategic advisory firm s...

By Sarah Johnson • Nov. 9, 2006

How ‘Obvious’ Is Your Company’s Patent?

As soon as the end of this month, the ruling in a case slated to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, KSR International v. Teleflex, could unhinge our patent system as we know it, some lawyers think.To be sure, the facts of the dispute involve something quite industry-specific: gas-pedal technolog...

By John P. Mello Jr. • Nov. 6, 2006

Buena Vista?

Microsoft engineers know a thing or two about operating systems. Co-founder Bill Gates transformed the fledgling software publisher into a business powerhouse by buying the Disk Operating System, then shrewdly licensing the program to IBM. Later, Microsoft cemented its place in the corporate pant...

By John Edwards • Nov. 1, 2006

Will the AICPA Take Over XBRL Standards?

Thanks to unrelenting cheerleading by Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox and, now, millions of dollars in SEC funding, XBRL is almost ready for prime time.After years of glacial development, XBRL (which stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language) may soon be suffic...

By David Katz • Oct. 30, 2006

Why PCs Fail

Leslie Fiering is the computer coroner. As an analyst at Gartner, the Stamford, Conn.-based technology-research firm, it’s Fiering’s job to figure out why some computers seem to last forever while others give up the ghost after only a few weeks. “Motherboards are the biggest problem,” she says, r...

By John Edwards • Oct. 23, 2006

Are Your Business Partners an IT Threat?

It’s hard for any company to do business these days without partners. Even vendors are routinely described as partners. But for the people within your company responsible for your network and computer systems, partners are more aptly described as a giant security headache.According to a recent su...

By John P. Mello Jr. • Oct. 16, 2006

Solving the Audit Gap

A piece of technology that’s probably already available in your office can help solve many of the IT-related deficiencies that crop up in internal control audits. What is it? The electric elevator, first built by Werner von Siemens in 1880.In all too many companies, before, during and after an au...

By Jabulani Leffall • Oct. 2, 2006