Seek and/or Destroy

There are two problems with e-mail: how to lose what you want to hide and how to find what you need to retrieve. Merrill Lynch’s Henry Blodget and Andersen’s Nancy Temple can attest to the hazards of the former, after discoveries of their E-memos led to federal prosecution. Untold numbers of less...

By Alix Stuart and Scott Leibs • July 1, 2002

Take Me to Your Ledger

The key to catching accounting improprieties may lie in your computer — via automated auditing processes called “auditbots.”“The ERP [enterprise resource planning] systems put in place at many companies have made it possible for outside auditors to embed software in the systems to audit transacti...

By Joseph McCafferty • July 1, 2002

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

Wireless Telecoms: Watch This Airspace

It is more than a century since Guglielmo Marconi pioneered wireless data transmission. Yet, if the current pace of innovation in the field is anything to go by, wireless technology is still in its infancy. The surge in popularity of mobile phones — their number will overtake that of fixed phones...

By Economist Staff • June 21, 2002

The Right Brain

When the dot-com bubble burst, so did the fevered demand for information technology workers. In this climate — and after the excesses of the boom — some finance chiefs might be seeking a little payback from those fat tech payrolls.Even as many lower-level tech workers seem to have lost ground in ...

By David Katz • June 5, 2002

What Goes Around

Maybe it’s payback time — or pay less time — for information technology workers.You don’t have to be Jerry Lucas to remember the days when corporate IT departments ruled the roost at many companies. During the new economy boom of the late nineties, tech employees were alternately coddled, stroked...

By David Katz • June 5, 2002

Mr PC Goes to Washington

When PC Forum, an exclusive shindig for technology bosses, venture capitalists and other digerati, recently celebrated its 25th anniversary, the motto was “back to the frontier”. But the panels and speeches suggested a different destination. Most debates were about what government should or shoul...

By Economist Staff • June 3, 2002

Taming the Software Beast

In 1998, when the IT department at Shell Expro, Royal Dutch/Shell’s UK oil exploration and production unit, put the finishing touches on a two-year software application-integration project, financial controller Darayus Wadia was overjoyed. The project allowed Shell Expro to replace 15 legacy appl...

By Adam Lincoln • June 1, 2002

The Tech 20

Because information technology exerts such a strong influence at companies of all sizes around the globe, and because it continues to evolve rapidly on many different fronts, it merits a closer look. On the following pages we offer snapshots of the 20 people, technologies, and trends that have ha...

By Scott Leibs • June 1, 2002

Incentive Management

There are any number of ways to motivate a sales force, from the pink “Kay-cars” dangled before Mary Kay cosmetics salespeople to the “Third prize is you’re fired” stick wielded so memorably by Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross.No matter what approach a company takes, someone, somewhere, has to...

By Adam Lincoln • June 1, 2002

Fewer Humans, More Resources

“We’re a people-intensive business,” says Tom Leahey, chief operating officer of STI Knowledge, a help-desk and call-center company headquartered in Atlanta. He isn’t exaggerating: Employees account for up to 80 percent of the company’s overhead. As a result, Leahey, who joined the company as CFO...

By Scott Leibs • June 1, 2002

Fewer Humans, More Resources

“We’re a people-intensive business,” says Tom Leahey, chief operating officer of STI Knowledge, a help-desk and call-center company headquartered in Atlanta. He isn’t exaggerating: employees account for up to 80 percent of the company’s overhead. As a result, Leahey, who joined the company as CFO...

By Scott Leibs • June 1, 2002

Automating Motivating

Ways to reward and motivate sales teams come in all shapes and sizes. While that’s great for companies keen to give the efforts of their salespeople a boost through innovative bonus and commission structures, it’s a nightmare for staff who spend countless hours monitoring and managing them.Now th...

By Adam Lincoln • May 29, 2002

Data Storage: Going Soft

It was supposed to be recession-proof. Storage firms, which sell the huge, refrigerator-sized boxes used by companies to house computer data, thought that their business would be immune to the high-tech squeeze. Even as the economy faltered, they noted, the volume of e-mail and other corporate da...

By Economist Staff • May 24, 2002

Disconnect: The Problem with Wireless

Will this be the technological Summer of Love? The wireless division of telecom company Sprint certainly hopes so. The company has unleashed a massive marketing campaign designed to educate and excite consumers and businesspeople about the possibilities of its so-called 3G technology. This “third...

By Scott Leibs • May 22, 2002

Windows XP: Ray of Hype?

Last autumn, Microsoft used Madonna’s hit single “Ray of Light” in a glitzy advertising campaign for the launch of its new desktop operating system, Windows XP. It didn’t take long for a joke to surface on the Internet suggesting that a more appropriate theme tune might be her song “Frozen” — a r...

By Jake Statham • May 15, 2002

Sending a Message

To many of its 320,000 users, the BlackBerry—a sleek, pocket-sized device that gives you access to your e-mail while on the move—is known as “Crackberry”, so addictive is the ability to read and write messages while in a taxi, on a train, or during a meeting. Research in Motion (RIM), the Canadia...

By Economist Staff • May 10, 2002

Top Ten Tech Needs of Finance

What are the most critical technology needs of finance managers?Not necessarily what you’d think. In the twelfth annual Top Technologies list released by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), respondents rated business and financial applications as their top tech priorit...

By CFO Editorial Staff • May 8, 2002

Class Struggle

Like college deans everywhere, Rick Taniguchi knows a thing or two about the high cost of education and the need to balance student expectations against administrative realities. Having lobbied for a $4 million expansion to his “campus,” his careful cost-benefit approach will soon be put to the t...

By Scott Leibs • May 1, 2002

The Real Thing?

What true fan wouldn’t pay a king’s ransom to own the football that decided the New England Patriots’s 2002 Super Bowl victory? More than 130 million television viewers watched that ball sail through the uprights for the historic field goal, but what they didn’t see was the mark proving it was a ...

By Tim Reason • May 1, 2002

Making It on the Web

As disasters go, the dot-com meltdown of 2001 vanished almost as quickly as it arrived. Not many netrepreneurs have offered an explanation of what happened. In the U.S., each month seems to bring a new book on the global dot-bomb, but no such outpouring has happened in Asia. CFOs with dot-com exp...

By Jasper Moiseiwitsch • April 30, 2002

The Telephone Is the Tool

Charles Cohen is happy to explain why his digital-cash scheme, called Beenz, bit the dust. The problem, he says, is that hard cash is symmetrical, digital cash is not. You expect a $5 bill to buy $5-worth of goods: but digital cash has costs that must be recovered. So $5-worth of Beenz, Mr Cohen’...

By Economist Staff • April 26, 2002

Making Wi-Fi Pay

As wireless operators around the world struggle with the transition to “third-generation” (3G) cellular networks, another wireless technology is taking off on its own. Wi-Fi, also known as 802.11b, uses unlicensed radio spectrum to enable computers within a few metres of a small base-station to s...

By Economist Staff • April 4, 2002

A Little Sanity Comes to Clauses

Most CFOs know only too well how arduous it can be to negotiate contracts. But far fewer may realize that the pain doesn’t end once the ink has dried on the dotted line. Common features of contracts, such as contingent discounts, rebates, and tiered-pricing agreements, require continuous — and co...

By Alix Stuart • April 3, 2002

How Safe Is Your Network?

Visiting Asia on business trips, Robert Clyde used to find computer systems security to be a tough sell. While the rest of the corporate world accepted that the greatest threat to corporate information systems lay within — among disgruntled and dishonest employees — this region’s business leaders...

By Adam Lincoln • April 2, 2002

All Hail the ROI

When Jeff Stewart, CFO at Clarkston, an IT consulting firm in Durham, N.C., went shopping for a big-ticket software package last year, he had no intention of being swayed by technological gimcrackery. His focus was on payback. “Times are tough,” he says. “These days our board won’t even entertain...

By Scott Leibs • April 1, 2002