In the Year 2025

When CFO began publishing, back in the primordial ooze of 1985, each issue contained a sizable amount of technology coverage. The editorial slant made sense. The arrival of IBM’s original personal computer just a few years earlier, and the subsequent release of Lotus 1-2-3, had turned the finance...

By John Goff • March 1, 2005

Same Caller, New Message

The move to outsource human resources continues to accelerate, despite the fact that the jury is still out on the primary reason to outsource: cost savings.“If you went to [HR] conferences a few years ago, the message was, ‘If you outsource, you’ll save lots and lots of money,'” recalls Robert Cr...

By Anne Stuart • Feb. 23, 2005

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

Any Storm in a Portal?

When the technology downturn took the exuberance out of the software business, Mapics Inc., an Atlanta supplier of enterprise systems, decided to shed real estate rather than people. The company made such a commitment to telecommuting that three-fourths of its staff now work from home, client sit...

By Scott Leibs • Feb. 22, 2005

Pressing the Money Button

When Henry Ijams looks at the way American businesses pay their bills, he sees a mess. “Our European counterparts are flabbergasted when they come to the U.S. and they see that we still make 80 percent of our business-to-business payments by paper checks; they can’t believe it,” says Ijams, manag...

By John Edwards • Feb. 8, 2005

Thumbscrew, 2.0

Seems those 17th-century Italians were wrong: you can get blood from a stone.In a move that is guaranteed to raise the hackles of finance chiefs at cash-strapped companies, software vendors are attempting to wring more money out of existing customers. Part of the wringing stems from revamped pric...

By John Edwards • Feb. 2, 2005

”Home-Sourcing” vs. Offshoring

As many U.S. companies prepare to export jobs overseas, other companies are working to keep them at home — literally — as a substitute for call centers. According to a recent study by consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton, not only is such “home-sourcing” cheaper than traditional outsourcing, but home ...

By John P. Mello Jr. • Jan. 26, 2005

Counterfeits and Cover-Ups

Is it real?That question may soon be raised even more often in offices, boardrooms, and courtrooms, as digital technology makes it increasingly easier to manipulate and duplicate corporate records.Contracts, deeds, photographs, letters, e-mails, spreadsheets, audio and video recordings, and even ...

By John Edwards • Jan. 25, 2005

Taming Postmerger IT Integration

To succeed, a merger requires the smooth integration of IT systems and services, but the task often plunges the CFO responsible for ensuring the savings into uncharted territory. Confronted by an immediate technical challenge, companies typically choose one of two questionable routes. Some, feari...

By The McKinsey Quarterly • Jan. 18, 2005

Toward an Imperfect Union

(Editor’s note: This article was reported before the Oracle-PeopleSoft deal was finalized, but its main point holds true: Customers of both companies have been and will continue to be affected in a variety of ways.)It’s part soap opera, part high-tech celebrity death match — Silicon Valley’s answ...

By Anne Stuart • Dec. 21, 2004

Buyer Beware

By many measures, outsourcing is a great success story. Service providers may have taken a severe beating from politicians and the press this election season, but they seem to have won the battle that counts most — persuading executives that outsiders can often do nonstrategic work cheaper and be...

By Don Durfee • Dec. 8, 2004

Six Degrees of Cooperation

Andra Marx knows the value of a good connection. Marx is a senior account executive at IntraLinks, a New York company that provides online meeting rooms in which employees of financial institutions, law firms, private-equity firms, and corporations hash out mergers, acquisitions, and other financ...

By Yasmin Ghahremani • Nov. 30, 2004

Getting a Grip on Performance

See the guide to business-performance-management software companiesSeveral recent developments in the world of business-performance management (BPM) software may inject new life into a concept that dates back to at least 2000. New competitors are helping to drive down prices, the need to cope wit...

By Connie Winkler • Nov. 23, 2004

Cap Gemini Denies Shopping Its U.S. Arm

Contradicting a report in the The New York Times, the chief executive officer of Cap Gemini said that the consultancy’s North American business unit isn’t up for sale.The Paris-based firm’s CEO, Paul Hermelin, said in a statement to the Financial Times that “Cap Gemini denies having plans to sell...

By Stephen Taub • Nov. 22, 2004

Men and Machines

The industrial complex that Henry Ford built on the banks of the Rouge River in Dearborn, Michigan, was a wonder of the new age of mass production. Into one end of the plant went iron ore, coal, sand and rubber, brought in by railway and on Great Lakes steamships. Out of the other end rolled Mode...

By Ben Edwards • Nov. 19, 2004

The Seven-Year Niche

Anyone paying even the slightest attention to the fortunes of Linux, the “free” computer-operating system beloved by techies and intriguing to CFOs, has probably noticed that a new buzz phrase has entered the conversation. “Open source” has become a staple of computer-vendor press releases and te...

By Bob Violino • Nov. 16, 2004

How Their Garden Grows

Much of IT is designed to get data to employees, but very little attempts to do the reverse: get information from them, particularly of the fresh-thinking and problem-solving sort that can enhance revenue. True, an entire discipline known as knowledge management has explored techniques for tappin...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Nov. 15, 2004

Let There Be Cheaper Light

Forget the mousetrap. Building a better lightbulb has been a constant — and profitable — pursuit ever since Humphrey Davy first invented the arc light circa 1810. Along the way, there have been major breakthroughs, including proto-light bulbs, carbonized-paper bulbs, and carbonized cotton-fiber b...

By John Edwards • Nov. 10, 2004

Hello There

It’s no secret that American companies outsource call centers to lower-cost locales. But customers often have no idea whether they are speaking with an operator in Baltimore or Bangalore. That’s because overseas call centers go to great lengths to help their staffs sound American, teaching them A...

By Joseph McCafferty • Nov. 3, 2004

Ready to Wear

Imagine, if you will, this scene from the future. A doctor — an anesthesiologist to be precise — enters the step-down unit of a university hospital to check on the recovery of a patient who underwent heart surgery 48 hours earlier. While noting the pattern registering on the EKG, the physician ch...

By Karen Bannan • Nov. 3, 2004

Desktop Business Systems Cut the Clutter

Many businesses have a crush of external and internal corporate Websites, first spawned by the dot-com frenzy of the 1990s. Typically, the internal sites are grouped around lines of business, departments, functions, even new-product releases. And almost as often, this “space junk” creates more pr...

By John Goff • Nov. 2, 2004

Cutting Through the Clutter

Over the past few years, the proliferation of virtual publishing tools has made it fairly easy for the average person to construct, populate, and maintain a Website. While this would seem to be a good thing, there is one minor downside to the trend: the proliferation of virtual publishing tools h...

By John Goff • Nov. 2, 2004

You Make Me Feel Young Again

Will legacy applications ever die? By now, you might think that most companies would have replaced software programs written in such musty languages as COBOL and Fortran. After all, many spent millions during the Y2K hysteria pulling out tangled systems and marshaling armies of programmers to rew...

By Don Durfee • Oct. 26, 2004

New Ways to Visualize Data

Maps are back. Many companies are looking for ways to cope with information overload, and while dashboards and other techniques continue to gain in popularity, maps are proving surprisingly versatile as well, even for deskbound workers.“Academic research shows that we can’t keep more than seven d...

By Connie Winkler • Oct. 19, 2004

More Map, Less Quest

Maps are back. More than a decade ago, geographic information systems took population and demographic data from the Census Bureau and other sources and gave businesses new ways to see opportunities, literally. Consumers could be segmented by zip code, for example, or regional sales could be analy...

By Connie Winkler • Oct. 19, 2004

Outsourcing Risks Worry the Wary

Biotech and pharma CFOs worry that by loosening their grip on their entireenterprise and relying on third parties, they might risk losing their competitiveedge. Desired cost savings and productivity gains may fail to materialize; it maytake too much management time and attention to move operation...

By Alison Rea • Oct. 14, 2004