World Wide Wobble?

As stunning as the cooked-books angle may be, the WorldCom saga extends well beyond the financial realm. The company’s role as a major telecom provider and operator of vast stretches of the Internet makes its troubles all too relevant to Corporate America.Shortly after the accounting scandal was ...

By Scott Leibs • Aug. 1, 2002

Going Hybrid

When the hordes of volunteer programmers who make up the open-source movement met this week for their annual convention in San Diego, one constituency was conspicuously absent: entrepreneurs. Many start-ups that tried to make money from open-source software have already gone bust, and many of tho...

By Economist Staff • July 26, 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

Identity Rules

When an industry group called Liberty Alliance announced specifications for how to manage “digital identities” on July 15th, it was hardly headline-grabbing stuff. Yet the event may prove important in the history of the computer industry, by marking the beginning not only of an ID system for the ...

By Economist Staff • July 19, 2002

Be My PayPal

The real surprise is that it took so long. For months, rumours had been circulating on Wall Street that eBay, the leading online-auction service, would buy PayPal, the dominant provider of Internet payments. When the takeover was finally announced on July 8th the terms, too, were much as expected...

By Economist Staff • July 12, 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

IT Spending: Same Budget, Different Day

For IT budgets, tomorrow is still a day away. New surveys from Morgan Stanley, Meta Group, and Gartner/Goldman Sachs find scant evidence of a second-half rebound in tech spending. The surveys do suggest that further belt-tightening is unlikely, but none found much reason to expect a significant u...

By Scott Leibs • July 1, 2002

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 Scott Leibs and Alix Stuart • July 1, 2002

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

Keep IT Simple, Stupid

Ask Philip Scorgie what the most significant IT improvement for his business has been in the past few years, and the answer won’t be newfangled wireless technologies or obscure EDI solutions. It will be simply that, for the first time, everyone at his company is reading from the same script. Scor...

By Jake Statham • July 1, 2002

ROI: The Age of Reason

It all started not long after Michael Kutschenreuter joined Siemens Information & Communication Networks (ICN) in April last year. Results for the quarter ended June 30th were devastating — Ebitda was minus $558 million (E563 million), compared with $132 million for the same period the previo...

By Janet Kersnar • July 1, 2002

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

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

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

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

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

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

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