The Price You Pay

Companies have grown accustomed to using information technology to design, manufacture, and ship products, and to slice and dice the numbers in every conceivable way after the fact. But what’s less well known is the role IT can play in determining the optimum price for a product or service. Since...

By John McPartlin • March 23, 2004

Happy Warriors

In the movie Multiplicity, an overworked Doug Kinney (Michael Keaton) allows himself to be cloned so that he can accomplish collectively what he can’t do individually. It doesn’t work out.Now, technology analysts predict something similar for the typical office worker, only this time multiplicity...

By CFO Editorial Staff • March 19, 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

Offshoring Goes on the Offensive

The big news at this year’s International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was all of the plasma televisions, digital music players, and other crossover gadgets that Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, and other computer giants are using to challenge consumer electronics stalwarts such as Phili...

By The McKinsey Quarterly • March 17, 2004

Stuck on the Middle

It’s no secret—to IT vendors, anyway—that the “midmarket” represents a golden opportunity to win sales as large companies rein in spending. Now, experts say, that opportunity may be even more golden as midmarket firms brace for a spending spree. Small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs), which number 5....

By Anne Stuart • March 16, 2004

Hold That Golden Spike

Rarely has a topic engendered so much agreement yet so little progress as IT/business “alignment.” Last year it topped the priority list among members of the Society for Information Management (SIM), a professional organization of CIOs that has been actively studying the issue for three years and...

By CFO Editorial Staff • March 15, 2004

The Cruelest Blow of All?

Here’s a sign of the digital times: in a recent study conducted by Dynamic Markets, technology employees said they thought E-mail outages were more stressful than car accidents or divorces.While the survey provides a glimpse of the strange but beautiful planet inhabited by IT workers, it also poi...

By Simone Kaplan • March 10, 2004

Answering RFQs, PDQ

A cynic, we’re told, knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Well, Michael Towe isn’t a cynic, but he does know the price of everything—or at least everything sold by GE Transportation International Pool (TIP) and GE Modular Space (ModSpace). As CFO of General Electric Co.’s Equip...

By John Edwards • March 9, 2004

The 64-bit Battle

The computer industry loves a good bunfight, so everyone is enjoying the current battle between Intel, the world’s largest chip-maker, and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), its smaller rival. Intel is currently on the defensive. This week Hewlett-Packard (HP), a computer maker and a close ally of Int...

By Economist Staff • March 3, 2004

The Discreet Charm of the SMB

As a rule, finance executives at small, Midwestern companies tend to be less guarded and less politic than their counterparts at large, East Coast companies. It’s not entirely clear why that is. Some believe it’s because smaller companies usually are closely held, and therefore less subject to sh...

By John Goff • March 2, 2004

Nanotech

Floor tiles that clean themselves. Military uniforms that automatically contract to prevent a wound from bleeding. Beams stronger than steel but lighter than plastic. Sounds like science fiction, but these are real innovations, thanks to the emerging field known as nanotechnology.What It IsNanote...

By Peter Krass • Feb. 25, 2004

Bum Steer?

Call them early adopters. This past December, reports began circulating that consumers in Malaysia were queuing up to purchase pirated copies of Microsoft’s next-generation operating system. This despite the fact that the new OS, code-named Longhorn, is not expected to go on sale until at least 2...

By John Edwards • Feb. 24, 2004

The Great Hollowing-out Myth

Earlier this month, President George Bush’s chief economic adviser, Gregory Mankiw, once Harvard’s youngest tenured professor, attracted a storm of abuse. He told Congress that if a thing or a service could be produced more cheaply abroad, then Americans were better off importing it than producin...

By Economist Staff • Feb. 23, 2004

Outsourcing

Is outsourcing on your agenda for 2004? Make sure your passport is handy. Offshore outsourcing of traditional IT work will grow 20 to 25 percent each year in the next few years, from its current market value of roughly $20 billion, according to Atul Vashistha, CEO of San Ramon, California-based o...

By Polly Schneider Traylor • Feb. 18, 2004

Composite Applications

For decades software programmers have been trying to make themselves obsolete. Some of them, anyway. They haven’t had much success, try as they might to invent software that would let nonprogrammer users create applications as easily as they create documents or spreadsheets. But such programmers ...

By Peter Krass • Feb. 17, 2004

Wireless/Mobile Computing

To a large extent, wireless technology has already emerged. Trouble is, it keeps emerging. From cell phones to personal digital assistants to pocket PCs, wireless devices continue to morph and improve exponentially. As a result, the challenge is not so much to understand what they do or how they ...

By Peter Krass • Feb. 12, 2004

Spy vs. Spy

Any way you look at it, 2003 was a real bad year for network security. Although corporate concern over cyber threats jumped dramatically, so too did the number of cyber attacks against companies and their machines. Indeed, security specialist MessageLabs reports that spam accounted for 50 percent...

By Esther Shein • Feb. 10, 2004

Security

It’s a classic technology dilemma: businesses know they must protect their computers from devoted hackers and disgruntled employees, but how much is too much?During the E-business boom, many large organizations—from AOL Time Warner Inc. to Oracle—appointed chief security officers (CSOs) to implem...

By Joseph C. Panettieri • Feb. 10, 2004

Utility Computing

For something billed as the hot new model in business computing, it’s got a distinctly unsexy moniker. Maybe that’s why everyone calls utility computing something else.At IBM, it’s “E-business on demand.” At Microsoft, it’s “the dynamic systems initiative.” At Hewlett-Packard, it’s “the adaptive ...

By Anne Stuart • Feb. 4, 2004

Investment Banks Outsourcing to India

The offshoring trend has taken another surprising turn. Having successfully outsourced to India such back-office functions as IT, investment banks are now sending some of their financial analysis and research overseas. In recent months, firms including J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley have quietly ...

By Don Durfee • Jan. 31, 2004

Sir Bill and His Dragons — Past, Present and Future

The announcement this week that Microsoft’s founder, Bill Gates, is to receive an honorary knighthood from Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II seems fitting. For Bill Gates KBE (only British citizens can take the honorific “Sir”) combines knightly philanthropy on an unprecedented scale with a long and i...

By Economist Staff • Jan. 30, 2004

Business Intelligence

By computer industry standards, the business-intelligence sector has reached full maturity. Many software makers have been around for more then a decade, and many of them, Information Builders, is even celebrating it’s 26th year. But the market is rife with change and innovation, most of which sh...

By John Verity • Jan. 27, 2004

Storage Systems

The good news: analysts expect storage prices to continue their double-digit declines, thanks to commoditization and competition. And given that storage is an area of the IT budget that has felt keen pressure lately, that should please most CFOs. The not-so-good news: storage requirements are inc...

By Russ Banham • Jan. 21, 2004

Battling the Property Pirates

More American companies these days are fighting in court to protect the intellectual-property rights of patents, trademarks, and copyrights. Indeed, roughly 2,700 patent lawsuits were filed in 2002, more than double the filings a decade ago, according to intellectual-property-management consultin...

By Ronald Fink • Jan. 20, 2004

Data Visualization

Companies are always looking for answers. Maybe it’s the looking that counts.Although the computer is often compared to the human brain, the brain has something that almost all computers lack: sight. After all, our eyes are merely the interface between brain and world, a hard-wired conduit for pr...

By John Verity • Jan. 20, 2004

Risks of Rogue Technology

At Forrester Research, analysts get to try out the latest “cool” technology for themselves: PDAs, Wi-Fi laptops, nifty storage devices. They also have the opportunity to try out some technology that many people would consider much more mundane: network “sniffing” software and intrusion-detection ...

By Russ Banham • Jan. 14, 2004