Park Anywhere

Like many executives, Joseph Muscari spends a considerable amount of time on the road — the CFO of Alcoa Inc. made nine trips to China alone last year.And in true road-warrior fashion, he does not travel light when it comes to electronics. Standard components of his arsenal include a Lenovo Think...

By John Goff • June 1, 2006

GE, Pepsi Join SEC Data Pilot

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced Tuesday that three more companies have joined the commission’s pilot program to furnish their financial information in XBRL format, bringing the total number of companies in the program to 20.XBRL — which stands for eXtensible Business Reporting La...

By Stephen Taub • May 24, 2006

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

Trash Talk

By the time your company’s computersare ready for the scrap heap, they aren’t just worthless,they’re liabilities. Businesses spend about $30 to retirean out-of-date PC, according to figures compiled bytechnology research firm Gartner. Add to that the cost ofbacking up and “sanitizing” (that is, e...

By John Edwards • May 15, 2006

Ready or Not, XBRL Is Coming

Testifying before the Senate Banking Committee Tuesday, Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Christopher Cox found it difficult to keep from straying onto his pet topic. “I’m tempted to go off on a riff on all the benefits of interactive data,” he said in answer to one question about mutua...

By Tim Reason • April 27, 2006

Due Diligence, Quick and Clean

Before the Internet became widely used, companies on the selling block hired outside lawyers to store the documents needed for due diligence in rooms at their firms. Representatives of prospective suitors often traveled great distances to view the documents during allotted, separate times. The co...

By Helen Shaw • April 27, 2006

Office Collaboration, the Wiki Way

“Wiki,” the Hawaiian word for “quick,” is also the name for collaborative Web sites that let users add and edit content quickly and easily.The best-known of these collaborative sites is Wikipedia, a multilingual Web-based encyclopedia. Unlike conventional online reference works, which are updated...

By John Edwards • April 24, 2006

Post-crash Confidential

Former suicide hotline manager Kelly Chessen has never heard of someone actually killing himself because his computer’s hard drive crashed, but she hears a lot of talk about it. Chessen, now the data crisis counselor at DriveSavers Data Recovery, was hired to help re-weave the psyches of clients ...

By John P. Mello Jr. • April 17, 2006

GAO Cites Poor SEC Information Security

The Securities and Exchange Commission has extensive information-security weaknesses, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office.The congressional watchdog agency found that the SEC has corrected or mitigated just 8 of the 51 weaknesses that the GAO reported as unresolved...

By Stephen Taub • April 4, 2006

Bidding for Big Ideas

Think of it as something like your next-door neighbors’ garage sale…except that your neighbors are named Hewlett and Packard.What’s billed as the first live, open auction of intellectual property will take place on April 6 at The Ritz-Carlton San Francisco. It will be the headline event of a two-...

By Esther Shein • April 3, 2006

I Got It on AppExchange

When SchoolDude.com Inc. needed a new accounting program to replace its existing QuickBooks system, it didn’t shop the usual channels. Instead, the Cary, N.C.-based maker of educational software turned to AppExchange, a new service that operates like an online mall, or, more accurately, much like...

By John Edwards • April 1, 2006

Latest PC Fashion: Shorter Boots

Years after TV sets solved a similar problem, personal computers still make us wait—and wait—between the time we switch on the power and the time we can actually do what we sat down to do. This year — in anticipation of Vista, the new version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system — San Jose-bas...

By John P. Mello Jr. • March 27, 2006

Future Office

Inside Hewlett Packard’s CoolTown IT-prototypes showcase in Singapore, Des Yee is in full steam. “This has a biometrically sealed chip,” he says, holding up an ordinary looking ID card. “During the personalization process, we scan your thumbprint, capture your signature, take a three-point biomet...

By Cesar Bacani • March 27, 2006

All That Glitters Isn’t Legit

A lawsuit by Tiffany & Co. against eBay Inc., seeking stronger brand protection for goods bearing the famous jeweler’s name, could have consequences that extend far beyond the online mega-merchant.Indeed, this is one of a series of cases that will determine “what kind of burden and liability ...

By John P. Mello Jr. • March 20, 2006

Podcasting: It’s How You Say It

Podcasts — easy-to-create, easy-to-distribute audio files, often spoken words rather than music — has become a popular means for individuals to “express themselves.” But just as with blogs — those easy-to-create web pages — companies are finding the need to set some standards on just what’s accep...

By Esther Shein • March 7, 2006

By Popular Demand

Growth comes at a price — and often it’s a company’s human-resources department that has to pay it. Consider Genmar Holdings Inc., a $1 billion maker of recreational boats sold under such brands as Wellcraft, Seaswirl, and Larson. A multiyear acquisition spree made it difficult for the company to...

By Megan Santosus • March 7, 2006

Can I See Your Receipt?

December was a bad month for software pirates. Nathan Peterson, accused of selling millions of dollars’ worth of vastly discounted software via the Web, pleaded guilty to two counts of copyright infringement and agreed to pay more than $5 million in restitution to nearly two dozen companies, incl...

By Scott Leibs • Feb. 28, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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