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 Alix Stuart and Scott Leibs • April 1, 2002

Web Services: Can We Talk?

Holly Burgess is happy with her web-based software; just don’t ask her how it works. The attorney and assistant vice president of advanced sales at CGU Life Insurance Co. of America, in Quincy, Massachusetts, says that in the year she’s been using PlanLab, from Impact Technologies Group Inc., she...

By Scott Leibs • April 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

Hutch’s Big, Big Bet

Frank Sixt believes in 3G. Really — he does. And not just believes, but bubbles. He says this of videophones, which he expects will be 3G’s main consumer hook: “The first time that I used the p2p (peer to peer) video application, I just found it astonishing. I was overwhelmed by that experience.”...

By Jasper Moiseiwitsch • March 28, 2002

Napster All Over Again?

The file-swapping of recorded music on the Internet has already sent the music industry into a spin. Now it is Hollywood’s turn to take fright. At its peak in February 2001, 2.8 billion music files were downloaded each month through Napster alone. The sharing of files containing pirated movies ma...

By Economist Staff • March 22, 2002

Another C Change

When Stephen Rietiker took over as CEO of Sulzer Medica at the beginning of August 2001, he knew he faced a tough challenge. Not only had the $880-million-in-revenues maker of medical devices been spun off from its parent just three weeks before, but it also had a slew of lawsuits in the U.S. fol...

By Mike Hanley • March 20, 2002

Software: Use It or Lose It

With money tight and staff stretched thin, the thought of overspending on software licenses or internal support can make CFOs and their IT counterparts blanch. That’s why, despite evidence that IT spending will actually decline this year over last (by 0.1 percent, according to a January survey by...

By Janet Kersnar • March 19, 2002

A Lemon Law for Software?

Events of the past six months have shown just how fragile the industrial world’s technological infrastructure can be. No question that terrorism can bring business districts, power grids, computer networks or air-traffic-control systems to their knees. But so, too, can stupidity, carelessness and...

By Economist Staff • March 15, 2002

The Poster-Child Who Grew Up

The birth of the Internet boom can be dated precisely. It began on August 9th 1995, when Netscape, pioneer of the web browser, went public. Its share price more than doubled on the first day of trading; mania ensued. Marc Andreessen, the boyish, round-faced, 24-year-old programmer who had co-foun...

By Economist Staff • March 8, 2002

Judging Tech? It Ain’t Easy

Time was, chief financial officers regarded IT departments as a financial black-hole. A whole lot of capital went in, but precious little light came out. What’s more, the gadgets normally used to measure return on investments simply did not work in that heavy gravitational field.But oh, how times...

By Esther Shein • March 5, 2002

Deskbound for Glory

In January, IBM made an announcement that probably wouldn’t have garnered much attention on even the slowest news day. The company signed a $5 billion deal with Sanmina-SCI Corp. to outsource the manufacture of its NetVista PC line.With the industry’s margins almost nonexistent and worldwide PC s...

By Scott Leibs • March 1, 2002

Hiring: The Self-Service Lane

The economy sputters, sending off an occasional spark into the darkness. Companies announce mass layoffs; others shut down entirely. The new economy, discredited, lies in ruins. Corporate managers desperately cut costs at every turn. A $63 billion-in-assets-company goes belly-up in the largest ba...

By David Katz • Feb. 26, 2002

Internet Firms: Party Like It’s 1999?

For a moment, it felt like the good old days of the new economy. When PayPal, an online payment start-up based in Silicon Valley, went public on February 15th, its shares surged by as much as 54%—even though the firm had lost $18.5m on sales of $40.4m in the quarter ending in December. PayPal had...

By Economist Staff • Feb. 22, 2002

Web Services: Let Battle Commence

It is easy to discount web services as yet another fad, but behind the hype surrounding this new way of letting computers talk to each other over the Internet lies a crucial question: who will provide the dominant software platform of the next generation of computing? Already, the battle lines ar...

By Economist Staff • Feb. 15, 2002

Where’s the Smart Money?

American banknotes bear the motto “In God we trust”. A humorous extension to this phrase—ascribed, unofficially, to the National Security Agency—is “All Others, we monitor”. That joke, though, may soon pale into reality, for such a phrase might well be a suitable slogan for the cash of the future...

By Economist Staff • Feb. 8, 2002

Maximizing Your Optimizing

Just 18 months ago, Ford Motor Co. was pleased with its first foray into profit-optimization software. By working demand-related data into its pricing (which options buyers wanted most, for example), it designed incentive programs that yielded impressive profit-per-vehicle figures.But profits pro...

By Alix Stuart • Feb. 6, 2002

Latest Downsizing Victim? Corporate Treasuries

Attend any corporate treasury conference these days and the chances are that the subject of outsourcing will feature on the agenda. Indeed, the concept of a company handing over bits of its treasury department to be run by a specialist third party is seen by many as one of the biggest trends of t...

By Justin Wood • Feb. 1, 2002

Core Values

When Jackson Laboratory completes the implementation of its new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system in April, you can be sure that CFO Lee Wilbur will be a happy man. The genetics research institution, in Bar Harbor, Maine, began the effort more than two years ago, and, along the way, the $...

By Scott Leibs • Feb. 1, 2002

Re-engineering in Real Time

It was only early last year that General Electric started to talk about its plan to digitise its entire business, but arguably the whole thing started much earlier, in the mid-1990s. That was when GE launched its “Six Sigma” initiative, the management method on which its redoubtable quest for per...

By Ludwig Siegele • Feb. 1, 2002

The Real-Time Economy: How about Now?

You can’t accuse Gary Reiner of being verbose and inefficient. Ask General Electric’s chief information officer a question, and you get a three-sentence answer that is right to the point. He prefers show-and-tell to lengthy explanations and intellectual tangents. And he regularly checks whether h...

By Ludwig Siegele • Feb. 1, 2002

Desirable Dust

When peripatetic futurologists such as John Gage of Sun Microsystems really want to impress their audience, they talk about “smart dust”. The concept is indeed intriguing. The dust in question is made up of tiny, wireless sensors that could be dispersed anywhere—say, over a battlefield to find ou...

By Ludwig Siegele • Feb. 1, 2002

Always-On People

Many pets already wear implantable biochips so they can be tracked. Will people be next? A search on the Internet yields a worrying several hundred finds, but a closer look reveals that most of these are websites maintained by overly sensitive souls who are bothered that the biblical “mark of the...

By Ludwig Siegele • Feb. 1, 2002

Timely Technology

Squabbling about who was the first to come up with “the next big thing” is a favourite game in Silicon Valley, and it is being played with gusto over the real-time enterprise. Vivek Ranadivé, the chief executive of Tibco, a Silicon Valley software firm, is miffed that Mr Khosla at Kleiner Perkins...

By Ludwig Siegele • Feb. 1, 2002

Deal Pricing: An Online Standard at Last?

Raising debt and equity online will become easier if software developed by quasi-newcomer i-Deal LLC is successful. The software provides a broker-neutral platform that can link the disparate backroom systems of corporate issuers and investment banks. Although the New York-based company is less t...

By Marie Leone • Feb. 1, 2002

Outsourcing: Should It Stay Or Should It Go?

With traffic to its consumer Web site doubling nearly every year since 1996 and online transactions surpassing $100 million annually, Amtrak knew its E-business operation was strained to capacity. Its first thought: outsource everything. So in late 2000, E-commerce directors Mary Cortina and Lene...

By Alix Stuart • Feb. 1, 2002

CFO Buyer’s Guide: ERP Software

When Jackson Laboratory completes the implementation of its new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system in April, you can be sure that CFO Lee Wilbur will be a happy man. The genetics research institution, in Bar Harbor, Maine, began the effort more than two years ago, and, along the way, the $...

By Scott Leibs • Feb. 1, 2002