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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whole New Ball Game

Ten years ago, as netscape’s IPO kicked off the dot-com boom and Amazon.com and eBay brought E-tailing to Main Street, Major League Baseball (MLB) was doing some innovating of its own. The league introduced a new round of play-offs, dubbed the Division Series, to great acclaim. It also scrapped a...

By Russ Banham • Sept. 28, 2005

The Meaning of Free Speech

Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the founders of Skype, which distributes software that lets people make free calls from their computers to other Skype users anywhere in the world, don’t usually travel to America. Legally, they probably could. But they prefer to avoid that jurisdiction, since th...

By Economist Staff • Sept. 21, 2005

Autodesk: Bubbling Over

It’s not every software company that can point to the dot-com bust as a good thing, especially when a good portion of its senior management went down in flames. But that’s the case at Autodesk Inc., the $1.2 billion maker of computer-aided design, modeling, and collaborative software products. Lu...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Sept. 15, 2005

Spreadsheet Heaven

There’s a certain irony to one of the trends sweeping across the market for business performance management (BPM) tools. The humble spreadsheet — heavily criticized by makers of specialist BPM software — is making a comeback. And intriguingly, it is the BPM vendors themselves who are pushing spre...

By Justin Wood • Aug. 24, 2005

What, Where, and How Much?

A Chinese proverb holds that to do good work one must first have good tools. Madeleine Fackler readily agrees. “Our whole job in IT is enabling the automation of the business,” says the CIO of LifeScan, a unit of Johnson & Johnson that makes glucose-monitoring systems. “I am responsible for a...

By John Verity • Aug. 17, 2005

Wi-Fi in the Sky

Modern air travel is a wonderful thing, especially if you like pretzels, endless reruns of “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” and thimble-sized bottles of Scotch. Of course, many executives eschew such in-flight fineries, preferring instead to work. But with cell phones banned, Internet access all but im...

By Esther Shein • Aug. 10, 2005

Sensors Working Overtime

Is that warehouse about to collapse? Is that turbine about to throw a blade? Is that oil well going to explode?All good questions, particularly if you happen to be standing nearby. But for managers at asset-intensive businesses, keeping tabs on heavy machinery and vital infrastructure goes beyond...

By John Edwards • Aug. 3, 2005

Somebody’s Watching You

In two years, spyware has gone from mere nuisance to serious concern, catching companies so off guard that many executives today still don’t know what exactly spyware is. Think of it as a computer virus that has found a purpose in life. Viruses and worms have long posed a risk to corporate securi...

By John McPartlin • July 27, 2005