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

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

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

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

What CFOs Really Think about Technology

Call it the fantasy baseball syndrome.Back in 1998, when the Internet first started coming into real prominence, players of rotisserie baseball believed the Web would give them an insuperable advantage over their competitors. By going onto the Net, fantasy leaguers could read every local newspape...

By John Goff • Jan. 29, 2002

Guard Up, Hacking Down

A welcome byproduct of increased national security is that the frequency and cost of computer-code viruses has dropped, says a new report from Computer Economics Inc. With cyberspace patrolled more heavily since September 11, “virus activity has been extremely low compared with prior months and y...

By Alix Stuart • Jan. 16, 2002

Data Storage: No Room at the Inn

Miklos Bajzath was in a bind. Staff at Volvo Information Technology, where he’s vice president of infrastructure and operations, were busier than ever providing managed-storage services for their main customer, Volvo Car Corp. While that was good for Volvo IT in one sense, in another it was a nev...

By Anthony Sibillin • Jan. 2, 2002

Ready for PRM Time?

These days, corporate executives banter about “relationships” more enthusiastically than a gaggle of guests on “Oprah.” They also seem willing to put their money where their buzzwords are: Customer relationship management (CRM), for example, is now a $13 billion industry growing at 20 percent a y...

By Scott Leibs • Jan. 1, 2002

The Ten Most Intriguing Technologies for 2002

“New technology buzzwords will be kept to a minimum next year and corporate IT investment will focus on projects that make a solid business case,” pronounces Klaus Elix, the chief technology officer of AMS Europe, a consultancy. While that might actually be music to the ears of many CFOs, the und...

By Anthony Sibillin • Dec. 1, 2001

Accounting for Bandwidth

Your company may block employees from visiting Web sites that don’t appear to further the corporate mission, but preventing that sort of wasted bandwidth is just one facet of a larger problem that often goes ignored. Business units think of bandwidth management as a problem for IT departments. Di...

By Anthony Sibillin • Dec. 1, 2001

Technology: Ten Smart Moves

For lots of companies, buoyant IT budgets are but memories. Many CFOs are now saddled with low returns on their investments. Yet for those in a position to invest, now might be the right time to play off the front foot. The question is, where best to channel resources in today’s tough business cl...

By Adam Lincoln • Dec. 1, 2001

Clear and Present Danger

Anthrax may be getting all the headlines, but the next lethal infection may be the technological kind. Hackers have posed a threat for years, but the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have raised fears that terrorist groups might wreak havoc on the Internet.According to security ...

By Esther Shein • Dec. 1, 2001

Grow Your Own Way

The holidays are right around the corner, and Kristen Onken knows just what she wants: better visibility across the supply chain and paper-thin inventory. Not exactly Irving Berlin territory, but most CFOs can relate. December is a crucial month not only for makers of toys and molders of cheese l...

By Scott Leibs • Dec. 1, 2001

Peering Through the Windows: A Conversation with Microsoft’s John Connors

In December 1999 longtime Microsoft CFO Greg Maffei announced he was leaving the software giant to become CEO at Worldwide Fiber, a Vancouver-based communications company now known as 360Networks. While investors barely reacted to the departure of the high-profile finance chief — Microsoft’s shar...

By Kris Frieswick • Dec. 1, 2001

A Good Idea Gone Bad

It seemed like a small, simple problem. In January, four customers of New York-based AXA Financial Inc. reported difficulty using a new self- service feature of EQAccess, the Web site that has provided individual customers with access to their life insurance and annuity accounts since 1998.Simple...

By Tim Reason • Dec. 1, 2001

Computer History: It All Started with Pies

“Is this the first step in an accounting revolution, or merely an interesting and expensive experiment?” asked The Economist in an article devoted to the world’s first business computer, nearly 50 years ago. The machine, the Lyons Electronic Office (LEO), was built by Lyons, a British catering co...

By Economist Staff • Nov. 21, 2001

Shake Well: Getting ERP and E-commerce to Mix

Executives at Whirlpool Corp. know a thing or two about spin cycles. After all, the company has been selling washing machines, along with a whole host of home appliances, for decades.So when it came time for the white-goods specialist to start conducting E-commerce in an enterprise resource plann...

By Esther Shein • Nov. 20, 2001

Doing eBay’s Bidding

To most punters, the thrill of an auction lies in its unpredictability. But auctions are meant to set prices efficiently, which ought to mean that, in an open auction, similar items fetch similar prices. This is especially true for goods with a published “book value”, such as old coins and stamps...

By Economist Staff • Nov. 9, 2001

For IT, a ”Triple Witching Hour”

In the wake of the terrorist attacks, the outlook for corporate IT departments has gone from bad to dismal. Already under the pall of economic uncertainty, firms must now reevaluate their contingency plans and computer security, and perhaps expand their use of a range of collaborative technologie...

By Scott Leibs • Nov. 1, 2001

Bandwidth on the Run

Bandwidth-laden wires are the arteries of a healthy E-business. Clog them with MP3 files, sports scores, and the like, and you risk starving individual business units of their data oxygen. So it is alarming that few companies pay much attention to who and what is responsible for the data that tra...

By Anthony Sibillin • Nov. 1, 2001

Application Mining: Dig We Must

For years, corporate IT managers have been trying to get their programmers to become meticulous record-keepers, documenting for posterity each and every piece of code that they write.One peek at any big IT department, however, reveals why this is far from the case today. Programmers simply don’t ...

By Anthony Sibillin • Nov. 1, 2001