The Matter at Hand

From medical schools to law firms to animal-feed companies to the halls of Congress, personal digital assistants (PDAs) are proliferating. The handheld computers that were once no more than gimmicky phone books are evolving into important business tools in a select group of workplaces.But the emp...

By Anne Stuart • June 15, 2003

Grinding Away on ROI

As the economy resists any sustained bout of good news, most discussions of information technology continue to center on how to get the biggest return for the least investment. As a result, the ROI business is booming, with consultants continuing to hawk various forms of guidance, from simple for...

By Chuck Lenatti • June 15, 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

Everything Must Go

The millennium started poorly for North Face Corp. The company’s logo was ubiquitous on college campuses, yet the manufacturer, distributor, and retailer of outdoor apparel was nearly bankrupt, largely because of problems with its supply chain.“North Face was losing $100 million on $238 million o...

By Russ Banham • June 15, 2003

Down but Not Out

Of all the Big Ideas spawned during the Internet boom, perhaps none blossomed so promisingly yet wilted so quickly as that of renting enterprise software over the Web. By some accounts, upward of 1,000 self-proclaimed application service providers, or ASPs, were launched during 1999 and 2000, wit...

By John Verity • June 15, 2003

Re: That Spam I Sent You

It’s hard to put a price-tag on what junk email is costing U.S. businesses. One company that specializes in blocking junk email claims spam costs U.S. businesses $10 billion each year in lost productivity. Of course, it’s not real likely that a company that specializes in blocking junk email woul...

By John Goff • June 12, 2003

Addicted to Options

According to a report in the well-respected San Jose Mercury News (well, we like it), tech salaries decreased in 2002. In fact, the Mercury News reports that the highest-paid executives at Silicon Valley’s largest companies took home $1 billion last year.While that may seem like a nice tidy sum, ...

By John Goff • June 5, 2003

The Summer of Our Content

“Content is king,” or so went one of the most common clichés of the dot-com era. But as companies generated ever more “content,” all that Web-site verbiage, not to mention reams of internal reports and other documents, started to seem less kingly and more of a royal pain. Often it can be so diffi...

By Doug Bartholomew • June 1, 2003

What XBRL Means For You

We know, we know. You’ve been hearing about the coming XBRL revolution for the past three years. So far, there’s been a lot more talking about the coming revolution than the coming of the coming revolution.But make no mistake, XBRL is going to substantially alter the financial software landscape....

By Scott Leibs and John Goff • May 29, 2003

Disaster Recovery: What, Us Worry?

With U.S. military forces now firmly in control of the whole of Iraq, the likelihood of terrorist reprisals against American interests seems high. Indeed, even as the government was lowering the terror alert level from Orange (high) to Yellow (elevated) last month, Homeland Security Secretary Tom...

By John Goff and Russ Banham • May 15, 2003

So What is a Centrino, Anyway?

You’ve probably already noticed television spots for Intel’s new mobile technology. Called Centrino, this processing platform for notebooks, PDAs and other portables, was launched amid tremendous fanfare in March. At the time, Mike Splinter, executive vice president at Intel, reportedly called Ce...

By John Goff • May 8, 2003

CRM, As You Like It

“Know thyself,” wrote William Shakespeare half a millennium ago. Shakespeare recognized that we all have elusive wants, feelings, and frustrations that set each of us apart from everyone else. So when Dallas Teachers Credit Union wanted to grow its assets two years ago, it adapted a lesson from t...

By Russ Banham • May 1, 2003

Where Wireless Works

The phrase “mobile workforce” still conjures up images of smartly dressed executives hurrying through airport terminals while conferring with colleagues on cell phones and checking E-mails on their wireless-enabled PDAs.But when it comes to boosting the bottom line by “going mobile,” CFOs would b...

By Jason Karaian • May 1, 2003

Design and Conquer

While ERP systems are often viewed as all-encompassing, particularly for companies in the manufacturing sector, new software is emerging that tackles a broad range of functions largely untouched by traditional applications. Dubbed PLM, for product life-cycle management, the software manages produ...

By Doug Bartholomew • May 1, 2003

Businesses Besieged by Spam

From the Nigerian civil servant hoping to move millions of dollars to offshore havens (with your help) to pitchmen hawking herbs and procedures that promise improbable anatomical transformation, junk E-mails now waste a few precious minutes of everyone’s day.Often referred to as “spam,” this onli...

By Tim Reason • April 1, 2003

Desk Be Not Proud

It’s telling that corporate employees, lauded as “stakeholders,” “clients,” “team members,” or what have you in certain contexts, are simply — one might say disparagingly — labeled “users” by IT folks. But, to paraphrase George Bailey, these rabble that pester the help desks do most of the workin...

By Scott Leibs • March 17, 2003

Get Smart

“Months late.” “Way over budget.” “Totally irrelevant.”If those phrases strike you as synonymous with “IT projects,” join the club.The good news is that the companies are finally getting some religion around this major, and majorly frustrating, capital expense. They be 20 years late and untold bi...

By Peter Krass • March 17, 2003

The Truth Is In There

In the film Catch Me If You Can, an inventive con man lived large on forged checks, thanks to ingenuity and an eye for detail. Today he’d need a degree in molecular physics. Bar codes and radio-frequency ID (RFID) tags allow a company to mark its goods inexpensively, but a new breed of molecular ...

By CFO Editorial Staff • March 17, 2003

Let There Be LEDs

CFOs who think they’ve maximized every technology investment their companies make should think again. While not, strictly speaking, a form of information technology, lighting does have an increasing technological aspect to it, particularly if it’s LEDs: light-emitting diodes. LEDs aren’t just for...

By CFO Editorial Staff • March 17, 2003

Who/What/Wi-Fi

The exhortations of Carrot Top notwithstanding, pay phones would seem to be inching closer to extinction one cell phone at a time. But a company called inCode Telecom sees a new role for them, as Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) “hot spots.” In a pilot program with Bell Canada, inCode is transforming pa...

By CFO Editorial Staff • March 17, 2003

Big Ideas and the Beauty of the Box

In this post-Enron, back-to-basics world, the thought of a CFO brimming with new ideas seems in itself a very bad idea. This is certainly not the time to get creative with tax shelters, off-balance-sheet financing, or revenue recognition. But if that’s true then what does the CFO bring to the tab...

By Scott Leibs • March 17, 2003

Quantum Loop

Business is booming at Erickson Retirement Communities Inc. Or, to be more precise, baby-booming. With an aging population about ready to bid farewell to the three-bedroom colonials of their middle years and take up residence elsewhere, the company anticipates substantial growth to its nationwide...

By Russ Banham • March 17, 2003

CRM: Once More, Without Reeling

The three letters “CRM” stand for customer relationship management, but given all the recent bad press CRM has been receiving, one might imagine they stand for “costly, rotten mistake.”How did we get here? CRM software, sold by a long list of vendors that includes Siebel, SAP, PeopleSoft, Onyx, P...

By Peter Krass • March 17, 2003

Centers of Attention

Last month, Sun Microsystems Inc. announced a raft of new technologies intended not only to give the company a boost in sales but also to refocus attention on an area of IT that hasn’t been buzz-worthy in years and possibly decades: the corporate data center.Wasn’t it supposed to have gone “light...

By Doug Bartholomew • March 17, 2003

Fine Time on the Desktop

Quan Ha was driving through Los Angeles when he heard a disturbing announcement on the radio. The Business Software Alliance, an industry group that combats software piracy and similar abuses, was urging companies to audit the software they use internally to ensure they had adequate licensing in ...

By Bob Violino • March 17, 2003

A Shore Thing?

Not long ago, after FBI agents raided a Massachusetts software company they suspected of having ties to terrorists, calls began pouring into Tata Consultancy Services, an offshore outsourcing firm. Clients, most of them large American companies and financial institutions, felt newly vulnerable: g...

By Laton McCartney • March 17, 2003