Is Everybody Happy?

In the boom times, companies spent lavishly to please employees: from free lunches to massages to, of course, stock options, no expense was deemed frivolous. After all, happy employees were productive employees.That’s still true, but the path to happiness has taken a marked turn. Companies are no...

By Alix Stuart • Nov. 1, 2002

Securing the Cloud

When the world’s richest man decides it is time for his company to change direction, it is worth asking why. Only rarely does Bill Gates send an e-mail memo to the thousands of employees at Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, of which he is chairman. He famously sent such a memo in D...

By Tom Standage • Nov. 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

Tools of the Trade

Ask a non-specialist about computer security, and he will probably mention viruses and attacks by malicious hackers, if only because they are so much more visible than other security problems. Take viruses first. Like their biological counterparts, computer viruses are nasty strings of code that ...

By Tom Standage • Nov. 1, 2002

The Weakest Link

The stereotype of the malicious hacker is a pale-skinned young man, hunched over a keyboard in a darkened room, who prefers the company of computers to that of people. But the most successful attackers are garrulous types who can talk their way into, and out of, almost any situation. In the words...

By Tom Standage • Nov. 1, 2002

Biometric Fact and Fiction

You’ve seen them in spy films and science-fiction movies: eye-scanners, fingerprint readers, facial-recognition systems. Such body-scanning or “biometric” systems, which can make sure that somebody really is who he claims to be, are touted as the ultimate in security technology. Systems protected...

By Tom Standage • Nov. 1, 2002

When the Door Is Always Open

Not long ago, at the height of the dotcom boom, you could chart the rise and fall of companies by looking at the garish artwork sprayed on the walls of loft buildings in San Francisco’s Multimedia Gulch district. But now, thanks to wireless technology, there is a better way. Driving around the ci...

By Tom Standage • Nov. 1, 2002

Putting It All Together

Total computer security is impossible. No matter how much money you spend on fancy technology, how many training courses your staff attend or how many consultants you employ, you will still be vulnerable. Spending more, and spending wisely, can reduce your exposure, but it can never eliminate it ...

By Tom Standage • Nov. 1, 2002

Is Everybody Happy?

In the boom times, companies spent lavishly to please employees: from free lunches to massages to, of course, stock options, no expense was deemed frivolous. After all, happy employees were productive employees.That’s still true, but the path to happiness has taken a marked turn. Companies are no...

By Alix Stuart and Scott Leibs • Nov. 1, 2002

Back to the Drawing Board

As W.C. fields once said, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, and try again. Then give up. There’s no use being a damn fool about it.”Companies that have rolled out customer relationship management software know what Fields was talking about. It’s ironic, too, since the concept of CRM softw...

By Russ Banham • Nov. 1, 2002

One with Everything

Two years ago, BP America’s human resources department was like nearly every other corporate HR department: waist-high in an avalanche of paper. Indeed, BP’s human resources department was so inundated by clerical tasks there was little time to do anything but push paper. Recalls Don Packham, sen...

By Russ Banham • Nov. 1, 2002

Web Services: A Work in Process

Could this be the beginning of a beautiful friendship? Web services and business process management (BPM), two promising if arcane approaches to software design, may prove to be a potent combination. If analysts’ predictions come to pass, the perennial question that haunts most companies’ softwar...

By Scott Leibs • Nov. 1, 2002

Spam: Filter It Out

“Vice-president of ideas, idealab”: did any job title better catch the Zeitgeist of Silicon Valley at its bubbliest? Surely the holder of that position is now cleaning tables in some Palo Alto diner? Actually, no. Scott Banister, the ideas-man in question, is proof that there is life after dotcom...

By Economist Staff • Oct. 18, 2002

A Step Ahead

For the past 15 years, Erik Brynjolfsson, the George and Sandi Schussel Professor of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, has been studying the economic impact of corporate IT investment and, more recently, the strategic drivers behind E-business. ...

By A CFO Interview • Oct. 15, 2002

A Terrible Thing to Waste

While it may be true that each of us uses only a small fraction of our brain (and slightly less on Mondays), does the same hold true for corporations, and is there anything to be done about it? Several computer-industry experts say U.S. companies have purchased billions of dollars worth of softwa...

By Peter Krass • Oct. 15, 2002

Good Names Gone Bad

Identity Theft: Good Names Gone BadHow can you be sure your customers are who they say they are? Last year, fraud cost the financial-services industry $35 billion as credit was granted to people who looked good on paper because they were pretending to be someone else. Plucking a credit card from ...

By Scott Leibs • Oct. 15, 2002

Virtual Close: Not So Fast

Whatever happened to the “virtual close”? Three years ago, as E-business dominated corporate agendas, it seemed that all companies would soon be able to close their books and produce financial statements in scarcely more time than it takes to click a mouse. A handful of companies, notably Cisco S...

By Janet Kersnar • Oct. 15, 2002

The Eyes Have It

In the movie Minority Report, an Orwellian tale set in the mid­-21st century, lasers routinely pick up people’s identity by scanning their eyes as they walk down a mall corridor. On the run from the law, special agent John Anderton escapes detection by swapping his baby blues for somebody else’s ...

By Russ Banham • Oct. 15, 2002

Survey: The Truth About Tech

When we asked more than 250 CFOs whether they are devoting more time to IT issues these days, a resounding majority said yes. When we asked them whether their companies have gotten the expected ROI from technology investments, almost half said no or rarely. And when we asked about their views on ...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Oct. 15, 2002

Save Us, Cash Flow Man!

Walk into the St. Louis headquarters of Ameren Corp. on any given day, and you’ll usually find employees gathered in large groups, staring intently at various computer monitors.A big company announcement on the company intranet? Another stock market plunge? Collaborative commerce?Hardly. These ha...

By Russ Banham • Oct. 9, 2002

The Never-Ending Audit

New developments in computer software could lead financial executives and accountants to completely change the way they conduct corporate audits. The question is whether that would be a good thing–and whether it could prevent the next Enron.So-called continuous-auditing software promises to trans...

By Scott Leibs and Peter Krass • Oct. 1, 2002

Outsourcing Software Management

If you were a CFO at a prospective client company, you had to love the pitch: Instead of paying hefty licensing fees to a software vendor and then waiting for your internal IT department to roll out, say, a big enterprise resource planning system, why not rent it from a company that was expert in...

By Scott Leibs • Oct. 1, 2002

Vive le ROI

Sometimes a finance chief has to cut his losses. Just ask Ross Hughes, CFO of Australia-based BankWest. In the early 1990s, executives at the bank, which has assets of more than US$12 billion, went shopping for a core banking system. When they couldn’t find an off-the-shelf package that met their...

By Adam Lincoln • Oct. 1, 2002

Knowledge Management: An Unnatural Act?

Wanchai, a crowded inner-city area on Hong Kong island. Huddled around two formica-topped tables in a jam-packed local restaurant sits a group of young men dressed in ubiquitous, Giordano-style clothes: short sleeved shirts, jeans or chinos, and running shoes. They look like students, but the pap...

By Karen Winton • Oct. 1, 2002

First Will Be Last

In the late 1990s, firms bet billions of dollars on a theory that turned out to be wrong. It said that in e-commerce, what mattered most was being first. Don’t worry about being best, if that slows you down. Sell your product at a loss, give it away, pay people to take it: just build your base of...

By Economist Staff • Oct. 1, 2002

Delete the Workers

If the number of Elvis impersonators continues to grow at the current rate, it will exceed the earth’s human population around 2010, it is said. The nerds in the typical firm’s IT support department are proliferating nearly as fast. According to IBM, growing complexity means that the number of IT...

By Economist Staff • Sept. 20, 2002