The Terrors of Tinseltown

Prologue Back in 1978, at the tender age of 24, I moved to Hollywood. I was an actor, you see, full of youthful bravado and convinced I was on a fast track to stardom. I had just wrapped the movie Meatballs, with Bill Murray, in which I co-starred as Crockett, the summer camp counselor with the b...

By Russ Banham • April 15, 2001

The Groovy Gurus

Generally speaking, E-commerce surveys offer precious little insight into E-commerce. Often, the polls are merely marketing come-ons dressed up as research. What’s more, many of the studies simply confirm the obvious: “New study shows Web sites that vaporize visitors’ hard drives tend to have low...

By John Edwards • April 15, 2001

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

To Serve Man

Like all software vendors, execs at Oracle Corp. are not exactly wallflowers when it comes to extolling the virtues of the company’s products. This industry tendency toward puffery may explain a press release promoting the Ebusiness Network, a how-to Web site on E-commerce that Oracle co-sponsors...

By Gary M. Stern • April 15, 2001

Lost in Translation

It’s every CFO’s nightmare: an expensive global marketing push that’s doomed before it starts. And it’s a lesson that executives at Panasonic (www.panasonic.com), the consumer products division of Japanese conglomerate Matsushita Electric, learned the hard way.In 1996, Panasonic licensed the cart...

By Adam Lincoln • April 15, 2001

Computer Not Feel Good

In early March, employees at a handful of US corporations received an email with the subject line: ”FW: Naked Wife.” Workers gullible enough to open the email attachment quickly discovered that many of their .ini, .exe, and .com Windows files no longer existed. Without those files, Windows-based ...

By John Edwards • April 15, 2001

Is Application Integration Software’s Next Big Idea?

Plenty of corporations have plunked down a big chunk of change on snazzy customer relationship management systems to milk current customers for all their worth and capture new ones. Unfortunately, all too many of them have woken up the morning after with a huge migraine of a systems integration p...

By Jennifer Caplan • April 13, 2001

Online Services and the Human Touch

Despite the best efforts of programmers, there are still many things that computers just cannot do. Examples include distinguishing between suspicious and legitimate behaviour on a corporate network, or sorting junk e-mail from genuinely important messages, or providing detailed answers to partic...

By Economist Staff • April 12, 2001

The Beast of Complexity

Stuart Feldman could easily be mistaken for a technology pessimist, disillusioned after more than 25 years in the business of bits and bytes. As a veteran software architect, the director of IBM’s Institute for Advanced Commerce views programming as all about suffering — from ever-increasing comp...

By Ludwig Siegele • April 12, 2001

New Execs at ERP Vendors Look to Web

James McGowan would have preferred that his first day of work got off to a better start. Early — very early — at 5:00 am on the morning of February 9, he showed up at the Hyannis, Mass., main office of Infinium Inc., a developer of enterprise resource planning applications. He had his keys to the...

By Joseph Radigan • April 12, 2001

Oracle Plays Catch up with PeopleSoft

Last year, when Oracle Corp. overhauled its enterprise resource planning software with Release 11i, it renamed the system the E- Business Suite to emphasize the degree to which the Web is now incorporated into the system.But more important, the company revamped its Human Resources Management Syst...

By John Xenakis • April 11, 2001

Why SAP Sees a Gold Mine in Portals

In less than a week, SAP, the 800-lb. gorilla of enterprise resource planning, spent $400 million to buy TopTier, announced an alliance with Yahoo to go after the burgeoning market for corporate portals, and created a U.S. based subsidiary, SAP Portals.The steps are intended to jumpstart sales of...

By Jennifer Caplan • April 6, 2001

Fewer Dead Dot-Coms to Kick Around

Reuters, citing a study from Webmergers.com, reported that the number of Internet company failures slowed down to 41 in March from 53 in both January and February.Based on the Webmergers.com research, February was the slowest month for dot-com shutdowns since October, when 35 firms went under.Sti...

By CFO Editorial Staff • April 5, 2001

Budget Planning Software Moves to the Web

Has there ever been a time when CFOs weren’t under pressure to provide accurate financial forecasts? Whether the audience is the CEO, the board of directors, shareholders, or Wall Street analysts, the numbers in the forecast had better be in tune with the real-world business conditions.Switch the...

By John Xenakis • April 4, 2001

Raising the VAR

Buying accounting software for your company should not be a solo effort. The success of an accounting software implementation may depend as much on your choice of an independent local dealer or value-added reseller as it does on the software vendor.“The VAR is a partner,” says Dan Lubin, VP of IS...

By John Xenakis • April 3, 2001

Private Exchanges Reinvent B2B

Two years after business-to-business marketplaces took the tech world by storm, the failure of many of these trading venues to live up to their hype has left many of their original boosters disillusioned. So does that mean B2B is as dead as a dot-com? Not quite.In fact, where public exchanges hav...

By Jennifer Caplan • April 2, 2001

IT Project Management

While it would be an overstatement to say that IT lives and dies by the project, project management is central to the IT mission. That mission is frequently in need of help. In fact, the “CHAOS Report,” produced by The Standish Group, and now in its sixth year, pegs the current success rate at ju...

By Scott Leibs • April 1, 2001

IT Spin-Offs

Could an idea whose time has come and gone have come again? In the 1980s and early ’90s, leading-edge companies in every business sector imaginable believed they could spin off all or part of their IT organizations and turn sizable internal investments into lucrative ancillary businesses. Most of...

By Scott Leibs • April 1, 2001

New Spins on Spin-offs

Many companies would like to milk revenue from thier IT investments. Some have found new ways to do it.Could an idea whose time has come and gone have come again? In the 1980s and early ’90s, leading-edge companies in every business sector imaginable believed they could spin off all or part of th...

By CFO Editorial Staff • April 1, 2001

Small World

The Year 2000 problem didn’t bring the world to an end, but it did make it smaller. Many U.S. companies established offshore computer-support operations in the mid-1990s, when the Millennium Bug created an urgent need for software talent. The most popular locations, such as Ireland and India, off...

By Tim Reason • April 1, 2001

Now They’re Selling Service

For executives at Sterngold, the rise of the Internet was nothing to smile at. Despite more than a century of dominance in manufacturing restorative dental products, the company watched helplessly as competitors gnawed away at its business with slick Web sites that provided reams of product data ...

By Scott Leibs • April 1, 2001

How to Pay on a B2B Exchange

The Internet is having a sweeping effect on every aspect of American business. Companies are saving huge sums in E-commerce by providing for online bidding, electronic processing and administration, and real time tracking of inventories and parts flow. An increasing number of companies are using ...

By John Xenakis • March 28, 2001

Beware ”Scope Creep” on ERP Projects

If you’re installing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, beware of “scope creep.” That’s the advice Philip E. Theiss, vice president of finance for Natural Organics, a privately held company based in Melville, N.Y., has gleaned from his company’s recent “technology lobotomy” — the trans...

By David Katz • March 27, 2001

Of Men and Mice: An ERP Case Study

For Lee C. Wilbur, there was the matter of the mice. To be sure, like other senior financial executives at outfits installing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, Wilbur, CFO of The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, has found that people problems can cause as many mishaps as flawed ...

By David Katz • March 21, 2001

Bill-Paying Services Follow the Money

For years, commercial banks have hawked electronic bill payment as a magic elixir for relieving the everyday hassle of running a small business, but they had few takers. Now that’s beginning to change: A trio of service companies are convincing single-proprietor firms and other small businesses t...

By John Xenakis • March 21, 2001

Intel and IBM Pair up for Wireless Market

Intel Corp. announced Tuesday morning that it will use IBM’s WebSphere Everyplace middleware as the embedded software for its Personal Internet Client Architecture (Intel PCA) for wireless devices and Internet appliances. Intel said the two companies will jointly develop hardware and software for...

By CFO Editorial Staff • March 20, 2001