An Easier Call to Make

About four years ago, Dave Thompson was looking for ways to cut his then-employer’s telecom bills. There was some buzz around a new technology called Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, a method of using the Internet, private data networks, or both in lieu of conventional telephone networks. I...

By Anne Stuart • Sept. 30, 2003

Spreadsheets Forever

This month the spreadsheet turns 25.4. Or 23.9. Or 24.7. That’s the beauty of the spreadsheet: change your assumptions and the numbers that derive from them change as well. So whether you’re dating the spreadsheet’s creation from its initial conception, its first commercial release, or the incorp...

By Scott Leibs • Sept. 16, 2003

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

IT Directions 2.0

Our second annual survey of CFOs and senior finance executives finds a surprising degree of optimism about technology, with companies not only prepared to spend more but also continuing to believe in IT as a source of strategic advantage. Given all the talk about IT as a “utility,” not to mention...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Sept. 15, 2003

Follow the Money

The very idea of “spend management” should appeal to any finance executive—particularly at a time when many companies face flat revenues. For many, though, the term is an oxymoron, as corporate spending has been anything but manageable.Now an emerging class of enterprise spend management (ESM) so...

By Bob Violino • Sept. 15, 2003

CFO as SOX Coach

Despite survey after survey suggesting that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 will not touch off an IT spending spree, software and hardware companies continue to insist that technology is a big part of the answer. So, too, does the consulting community.A report from Forrester Research (dubbed the “...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Sept. 15, 2003

Re-reengineering

Two years ago, LexisNexis realized that its ability to serve new Web-based customers was severely strained. Thousands of small and midsize law firms represented a huge business opportunity for the company’s legal-information services, but they often had to wait 48 hours to have their Web accounts...

By John Verity • Sept. 9, 2003

Keys to Successful BPO Relationships

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Rhode Island wanted to leverage the cost efficiencies and performance enhancements of business processes outsourcing, but was concerned about the risks of transferring critical functions to a third party. “There are a lot of loose strings associated with an arrangement s...

By Russ Banham • Sept. 3, 2003

Stopping the Flow

Last October, a Reuters reporter noticed that Swedish software company Intentia used nearly identical URLs, or Web-page addresses, when posting its first- and second-quarter financial results to the Web. Following the pattern, the reporter typed in the likely URL for the third quarter. Lo and beh...

By Tim Reason • Sept. 1, 2003

The Tax Man vs. Hedonists

At a time when technology start-ups are rare and technological innovation even rarer, this Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company plans to launch an entire suite of products designed to help companies manage financial performance. The first product, out later this month, is tax-planning software that ca...

By John P. Mello Jr. • Aug. 26, 2003

The Urge to Merge

Jim Prevo, chief information officer at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters in Waterbury, Vt., understands why, early in the last century, the ranks of automobile makers narrowed from more than 100 to just a handful. Yet, as a similarly momentous consolidation looms over the enterprise software market...

By John Verity • Aug. 5, 2003

Under One Roof

When Hughes Electronics Corp. began to outsource various human-resources functions several years ago, the goal was “cost avoidance, rather than a reduction in current costs,” says Sandra L. Harrison, senior vice president for HR and administration.The main cost the global communications company w...

By Lori Calabro • Aug. 1, 2003

A More Perfect Union?

Last year, when the state of California sought to remedy a massive technology headache — canceling a $95 million contract with Oracle Corp. when projected savings, bidding procedures, and even campaign contributions raised red flags — four state officials resigned and California dismantled a stat...

By Peter Krass • Aug. 1, 2003

Who Reports to Whom?

Should CIOs report to CFOs?Increasingly, the answer coming from CIOs and human-resource directors alike is no. In sharp contrast to the past, chief operating officers (COOs) or chief executives, not CFOs, are overseeing their IT chiefs.That’s good news, says Tim Stanley, CIO of Harrah’s Entertain...

By Russ Banham • July 30, 2003

Applying a Little Business Intelligence

After spending years rolling out complex and costly enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, many companies today are sitting on massive storehouses full of raw, largely transactional data. To extract the most important information from those databases — and to make the calculations that can p...

By Jennifer Caplan • July 22, 2003

IT Spending: All Used Up

Mention the management of IT departments to CFOs, and most just roll their eyes.Indeed, CIOs have gained a reputation — fair or otherwise — for being oblivious to budgets. But tech heads better get a little spending religion, particularly if the results of a new survey are spot-on.According to Fo...

By Marie Leone and John Goff • July 17, 2003

Who Will Audit the Auditors?

The hottest software for corporate managers these days might be too hot to handle.Just ask Scott A. Taub, the deputy chief accountant for the Securities and Exchange Commission. He recently issued a caveat emptor for software marketed by accounting firms to help clients track and evaluate interna...

By Craig Schneider • July 14, 2003

IT Pay: Keep It Short, Stupid

Justified or not, tech workers have a reputation for being a flighty, mercurial bunch. Indeed, during the dot-com frenzy of the late 1990s, employers went to great lengths to attract and retain prized IT workers — and even some workers who weren’t so well thought of. The perks, including lavish s...

By Scott Leibs and John Goff • July 10, 2003

Bitten by an ASP

The ongoing opera starring Oracle, PeopleSoft, and J.D. Edwards, has many IT-watchers (this one included) predicting a consolidation in the technology sector. Indeed, if Oracle’s hostile takeover bid for rival PeopleSoft is approved by government regulators and PeopleSoft shareholders, it will ve...

By CFO Staff and John Goff • July 3, 2003

SARS: A Preview of Things to Come?

Back when companies actually feared Y2K, Convergys Corp. put in place a business-continuity plan that designated “incident commanders” at each of its more than 40 sites to handle emergencies. Now those same commanders are tackling a new, and possibly more virulent, threat — Severe Acute Respirato...

By Joseph McCafferty • July 1, 2003

Buyer Be Aware

Because it’s nearly impossible to draw precise boundary lines around technology categories, companies that sell software are often free to ride the wave of whatever three-letter acronym happens to be hot at the moment. As a result, a panoply of software products continues to crowd into the CRM (c...

By Alix Stuart • July 1, 2003

Out with the Old, Somehow

When Huntington Bancshares bought 4,000 new personal computers last year, it held out some hope that the 2,000 old PCs and several hundred servers it was replacing would fetch something on the used-computer market. As it turned out, the bank literally could not give them away. “The machines are b...

By Norm Alster • June 16, 2003

Nothing to Hide

Grouse all you want about the costs and headaches of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, but the new regulations are having a major and largely positive impact on the way many publicly traded companies view their investor relations (IR) function. CFOs and other senior executives, in fact, are now enlistin...

By Laton McCartney • June 16, 2003

A Piece Plan for ERP

One of the most vexing IT issues facing large companies is deciding when and how to integrate the disparate “instances” of ERP software scattered throughout the organization. AMR Research suggests that companies begin by asking why. In studying more than 60 companies in various stages of ERP cons...

By CFO Editorial Staff • June 16, 2003

IT Spending a Dud, Says Study

If information technology has lost some allure, at least it has plenty of company. A new book, What (Really) Works, tosses “IT investment” onto a vast scrap heap of 200 management practices that fail to drive value.In studying 160 companies over five years, the authors, William Joyce, Nitin Nohri...

By CFO Editorial Staff • June 15, 2003

An Exercise in Utility

“All analogies are false.” So intoned a history professor of mine, usually just before or after making an analogy. Analogies are extremely useful, even when, as creative-thinking expert Edward de Bono has noted, they don’t quite fit, because they provoke fresh ways of thinking about problems.One ...

By Scott Leibs • June 15, 2003