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

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

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

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

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

The Marketing Power of Blogs

As recently as a few years ago, few corporate executives were big fans of blogs. The personal Web pages gave a free and open voice to customers and ex-employees — too often, irate customers and disgruntled ex-employees. In some cases, corporations went to court to try to get business-bashing blog...

By John Edwards • Oct. 13, 2004

Blogging for Dollars

In July, Microsoft Corp. did what would have probably been unthinkable just a few years ago: the Bellevue, Wash.-based company’s MSN division launched a commercial Web-log service; that is, a service that enables customers to set up their own personal online journals. Reportedly, executives overs...

By John Edwards • Oct. 13, 2004

The Enemy Within

Back in the 1950s, when Pitney Bowes was in the uncomplicated business of supplying postage meters to U.S. corporations, the company’s big security concern was relatively pedestrian: now and then, somebody’s relative would walk off with a meter machine.Over the past 50 years, risk management at P...

By Russ Banham • Oct. 6, 2004

IT Security Starts Between the Ears

Pitney Bowes, the company that once was in the uncomplicated business of supplying postage meters is now a $4.6 billion (in revenues) mail-and-document-management specialist. Yet despite an array of state-of-the-art firewalls, software, and encryption algorithms to fend off network invaders, the ...

By Russ Banham • Oct. 6, 2004

The ABC’s of ERP

Even as Y2K ushered in boom times for ERP vendors, they were beset by a string of negative press reports regarding the complexity and cost of getting their software to run effectively — assuming it could be made to run at all. ERP horror stories abounded, with Hershey Foods Corp.’s perhaps the be...

By Doug Bartholomew • Oct. 5, 2004

ERP: Tech Project or Business Project?

Most companies of a certain size — generally $100 million and above, although simplified ERP software is available for much smaller companies — find ERP virtually indispensable. ERP serves as an all-important information pipeline that links finance, manufacturing, logistics, sales, and other depa...

By Doug Bartholomew • Oct. 5, 2004

A Touchy Election Issue

As the Presidential election approaches, one of the hottest debates has nothing to do with the candidates. Instead, the controversy centers on the reliability of E-voting, which takes two forms: direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines that provide touch-screen selection, and voting via ...

By Roxanne Khamsi • Sept. 30, 2004

Ripe for the Picking?

If you’re wondering whether it’s time for your company to join the wireless revolution, we have some news for you: it already has, for better and worse. During the past few years, thousands of cell phones, BlackBerry devices, pagers, wireless PDAs, and wireless-enabled laptops have almost certain...

By John McPartlin • Sept. 22, 2004

Can SOA Simplify IT?

While Moore’s Law and fierce competition among vendors virtually guarantee that your IT dollar will continuously gain in purchasing power, don’t let the good deals blind you to an underlying truth: the complexity of what you’re buying may be no bargain at all.New thinking may be called for, a new...

By John Verity • Sept. 21, 2004

GE Plans Sale of Outsourcing Unit

General Electric Co. is engaged in talks to sell all or part of GE Capital International Services (GECIS), its India-based call-center unit, reported The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the situation. The business-process-outsourcing operation could fetch as much as $1 billion.GE...

By Craig Schneider • Sept. 20, 2004

Money for (Almost) Nothing

Who remembers Flooz? Or Beenz? At the height of the dot-com craze, they were among the alternative currencies proposed as a way to facilitate low-value (typically $5 or less) electronic transactions.Early efforts failed, but the idea of an electronic payment that could be used for such transactio...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Sept. 20, 2004

Outsourcing on the Outs at JP Morgan Chase

About 4,000 technology workers and contractors currently employed by International Business Machines Corp. must be starting to feel a little dizzy.The workers had been transferred from JP Morgan Chase & Co. to IBM as part of an outsourcing agreement hailed as “the largest of its kind” less th...

By Ed Zwirn • Sept. 17, 2004

Not Sold on Themselves

With the holidays just…well, let’s not start counting down yet. But when they do arrive, they will no doubt extend what has become a new tradition: gauging the impact of online sales.Web shopping has many virtues and has shown strong gains from one year to the next, but one group is not particula...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Sept. 17, 2004

How Finance Should Partner with Tech

A recent survey by McKinsey & Co. found that the number of CIOs reporting to CFOs doubled in 2003, and the consultancy expects that trend to continue as companies look to get more value from IT. Other surveys have found similar results, and IT consulting companies and magazines are now bursti...

By Scott Leibs • Sept. 15, 2004

Safety, in Numbers

What price security? Somewhere between $110 and $334 per employee, depending on the size of your company.Economies of scale allow larger companies to spend less per employee, while companies in certain industries (transportation, high tech, and telecommunications, as well as federal and state gov...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Sept. 15, 2004

Coping with Complexity

While Moore’s Law and fierce competition among vendors virtually guarantee that your IT dollar will continuously gain in purchasing power, don’t let the good deals blind you to an underlying truth: the complexity of what you’re buying may be no bargain at all. In a recent study of more than 20 la...

By John Verity • Sept. 15, 2004

Look Who’s Talking

When Bobby Lie, now a senior vice president for enterprise architecture at Fidelity Investments, was in charge of usage-based billing, he had the largely thankless task of hitting up the financial-services company’s many business units for their respective shares of network expenditures. With net...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Sept. 15, 2004

Outsourcing Far Afield or Close to Home?

India remains the most popular information-technology offshoring location for U.S. companies, but observers say India’s period of competitive advantage may be waning. In fact, with local wages rising at a 20 percent annual clip, executives at companies from Bangalore to Brahmapur are reportedly b...

By John Edwards • Sept. 8, 2004

The Farthest Shore

Last year, when management at call-center services specialist LiveBridge Inc. was searching for a place to house the company’s Spanish-language operation, it looked south of the border — way south of the border. After considering the more traditional outsourcing venues in Latin America, the Portl...

By John Edwards • Sept. 8, 2004

Clean Machine

The two big changes in cars themselves over the next ten years will be in electronics and engines. Electronics are taking over more and more of a car’s controls, and are now making it possible to connect cars as well as drivers with the outside world. It is only a matter of time before the indust...

By Economist Staff • Sept. 3, 2004