Up All Night

For all the corporate exhorting of workers to cut costs wherever possible, employees remain a decidedly wasteful group. This is particularly true when it comes to using office equipment. Copier machines, expensive appliances to operate under the best of circumstances, are treated as personal prin...

By John Goff • Jan. 13, 2004

64-Bit Computing

Copernicus, Newton, Kepler, and Einstein all developed “laws” or theorems so fundamental to our understanding of the universe that they are known to every schoolchild. Moore’s Law isn’t quite up there with E=mc2 on the greatest-hits list, but it isn’t far behind. The notion that computing power w...

By Peter Krass • Jan. 8, 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

The New New Economy

Except for Xerox and FedEx, few corporate names ever make it into the lexicon of action verbs. The latest entry, however, appears to be search-engine specialist Google, which is now invoked routinely by users of the Internet (“How did you find me?” “I just Googled your name.”).While Google’s migr...

By John Edwards • Jan. 7, 2004

Will Bush Go to Bat for Intellectual Property?

General Motors executives are likely to be taking a keen interest in Chinese premier Wen Jiabao’s visit to the White House this week.Days before the premier’s arrival, the Chinese government agreed to talk with the U.S. automaker about GM’s charges of intellectual property piracy by a company in ...

By Ronald Fink • Dec. 10, 2003

Analyze This

In the early 1950s, Harry Markowitz began formulating his groundbreaking theories on modern portfolio management. Applying the concepts of variance and co-variance, Markowitz showed that a diversified portfolio of financial assets can be optimized to deliver the maximum return for a given level o...

By Edward Teach and John Goff • Dec. 1, 2003

Whose Life Is It, Anyway?

Like most virtual retailers, Guess.com—the online outfit of clothier Guess Inc.—proudly displays its privacy policy right on the Website. Six months ago, the pledge read: “This site has security measures in place to protect the loss, misuse, and alteration of the information under our control.” R...

By John Goff • Dec. 1, 2003

The 20/20 Issue

This issue caps the first full year of CFO IT, a year in which we received many encouraging words from readers, won several awards, missed a typo or two, and, most important, sought to bring a fresh and relevant perspective to IT strategy as viewed from the CFO’s office. We’re not unhappy with ou...

By Scott Leibs • Nov. 17, 2003

Electronic Payments

Moving money by wire must qualify as the original form of E-business: its roots can be traced back more than 100 years. But the relatively new field of E-invoicing, plagued by the clunky terms electronic bill presentation and payment (EBPP) and electronic invoice presentment and payment (EIPP), h...

By Julie Sturgeon • Nov. 17, 2003

Grid Computing

A number of surveys, including our own, have revealed the unsettling fact that many companies have bought more technology than they need. To grasp the magnitude of this waste, look no further than the powerful computer on your desk. What does it do most of the day? It waits…and waits…and waits. E...

By Peter Krass • Nov. 17, 2003

Collaborative Computing

Collaboration used to be simple: stock a meeting room with soda, coffee, and a whiteboard, add workers, and shake until done. No longer. Today collaboration involves not only your co-workers but also members of dispersed “virtual” work teams: salespeople, distributors, retailers, suppliers, custo...

By Peter Krass • Nov. 17, 2003

Linux

Long synonymous with “free,” at least in the minds of CFOs, Linux will acquire new associations in 2004 as the New Age mysticism that surrounds it gives way to significant momentum, increasing possibilities and strategic decisions aplenty. Linux, the computer operating system architected by Linus...

By Russ Banham • Nov. 17, 2003

Enterprise Suites

It doesn’t get more “core” than ERP. Enterprise resource planning software is at the heart of most large companies today. It also tends to be at the heart of their IT budgets, with price tags running from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of dollars.Major ERP vendors enjoyed boom time...

By Russ Banham • Nov. 17, 2003

Software Licensing

With customers eager to strike better deals, IT firms have responded with a spate of new licensing options. But analysts say that can sometimes resemble a shell game. “When you look at the details, less has changed in the licensing market than people might believe,” says Scott Lundstrom, CTO at A...

By Julie Sturgeon • Nov. 17, 2003

It’s Who You Know

There was a time in the early ’90s when “expert systems” were heralded as a breakthrough in knowledge management. The goal was to capture and forever reap the rewards of a company’s best and brightest. The systems took various forms, but all in essence sought to extract, through interviews and ot...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Nov. 17, 2003

Corralling Costs

A black hole. That’s how most finance chiefs like to describe their marketing departments. Taking up much of a company’s discretionary spend, marketing departments have come under fire for years for being free-wheeling spenders that shirk any attempts to instil the sort of financial rigour and an...

By Jason Karaian • Nov. 1, 2003

Do Not Call Waiting

It seemed to be going so smoothly, too. After years of debating and months of preparation, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) finally had a rollout date for its much-ballyhooed Do Not Call Registry. The list, which contains more than 50 million phone numbers that would be off-limits to most telem...

By Esther Shein • Nov. 1, 2003

Drowning in Data

Recently, a major technology vendor sent out questionnaires to senior business managers about data and decision-making. A number of them came back with additional comments, most of them variations on a theme: “Data is buried in a sea of noise.” “Swamped in information.” “I’m drowning.” Despite—or...

By John Goff • Nov. 1, 2003

How Good Is Google?

If the ultimate measure of impact is to have one’s name become a new verb in the world’s main languages, Google has reason to be proud. When they founded the company five years ago, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, friends at Stanford University, chose a word play on “googol” — the number 1 followed b...

By Economist Staff • Oct. 31, 2003

Your Replacement or Mine?

Although it seems long ago, there was a time when companies routinely replaced their old personal computers every three years and sometimes sooner. Now, with money tight and PCs powerful enough to handle most office tasks, companies are hanging on to them for four or five years and sometimes long...

By Doug Bartholomew • Oct. 22, 2003

The Last Bastion of Hope

Recently, IBM rolled out a new suite of products and services developed and priced specifically for midsize businesses. Ditto for Big Blue’s Lotus subsidiary. And Hewlett-Packard. And Microsoft. And J.D. Edwards, and Oracle, and Net-Ledger—and just about every other IT vendor on the planet.What g...

By Norm Alster • Oct. 21, 2003

Services Pending

In July, executives at Hewlett-Packard Co. announced that the company had submitted its framework for the development of Web-services management. HP submitted its proposal to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), one of the two major global consortia ov...

By John P. Mello Jr. • Oct. 14, 2003

Agents of Creation

They certainly cannot be faulted for a lack of ambition. The scientists and engineers who gathered this week in Oxford for the first International Workshop on Complex Agent-Based Dynamic Networks are seeking to explain much of the world’s behaviour through the use of “agents”. In this context, an...

By Economist Staff • Oct. 10, 2003

Technology Throws Another Curve

“They’ve got physical numbers on a piece of paper. It’s about control, manipulation, and coercion.”Can you guess the speaker, or the context of that remark? Here are some hints: It involves shredded documents, a whistle-blower, and (potential) federal intervention. But before you reach for the ob...

By Scott Leibs • Oct. 8, 2003

The China Syndrome

Mike Sophie has good reason to smile these days. In a year that’s been rough for almost every business sector, the CFO and vice president of finance at Alameda, California-based UTStarcom is expecting an 86 percent jump in revenue, from $982 million in 2002 to a record $1.8 billion. And he hopes ...

By Abe De Ramos • Oct. 1, 2003

Does Dell Stack Up?

When Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Inc., made the startling pronouncement last year that the Round Rock, Texas-based technology giant will double its revenues to $60 billion during the next several years, he sent a clear signal that the company plans to move well beyond its PC roots. Ach...

By Russ Banham • Oct. 1, 2003