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News, trends, and research that drive IT strategy.

Better Numbers?

Just one year ago, according to research by business advisory firm The Hackett Group, only 9 percent of US companies said they had confidence in their financial forecasts and reporting outputs. Now, thanks to the demands of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, that figure is up to 67 percent.

Good news, but it comes at a price: for the first time in years, companies have been largely unable to reduce overall finance costs. Meanwhile, monthly closing cycles have actually grown longer. From 1992 to 2002, Hackett found, the typical company in its survey base was able to cut the percent of revenue consumed by the finance department by 58 percent, to 1.08 percent of revenue. But that figure has remained essentially unchanged for the past two years.

Hackett labels as "world class" those companies that score in the top 25 percent in both the efficiency and effectiveness of their output metrics in a given functional area. World-class companies differ from their peers in many respects, including the use of IT. World-class companies, says Hackett, are far more likely to rely on a central data repository to generate performance reports. They are also more likely to use integrated budgeting/planning software, and online tools that provide employees with a self-service system for ad-hoc queries and financial reports. They spend more on IT (30 percent more, on average) and tend to consolidate on a single ERP system..

Mobile Aspirations: Will tablets take off?

Americans may be a sedentary lot, but not, it seems, at work. How else to explain the many efforts computer companies are making to satisfy the needs of the "mobile workforce"? Laptops and PDAs continue to shrink and get more powerful, cell phones are turning into multifunction devices, and tablet computing continues to attract new players along with the substantial efforts of old ones.

This summer, Microsoft will release a new version of the Windows operating system it developed expressly for tablet computers, one that promises a number of improvements to the tablet's ability to "understand" handwriting and otherwise deal with pen-based input in more user-friendly ways (such as allowing handwritten notes to be embedded in Word documents and other applications). And new entrants to the tablet field will soon introduce cheaper, more-powerful machines that may essentially eliminate the premium that customers currently pay for the ability to use a pen as an input device and enjoy the greater portability of tablets.

Tablet computers come in two forms: slates, which have no keyboard and rely on a penlike pointer for input (think UPS delivery guy), and "convertibles", which have a detachable keyboard and are often dockable on a desktop, making them particularly versatile but usually heavier than slates. While tablet sales are currently dominated by familiar names (Toshiba, Hewlett-Packard, Acer, and others), new companies hope to make a mark. Averatec will soon unveil a convertible model complete with optical disk drive and built-in wireless capabilities for US$1,299.

Motion Computing specializes in slate computers aimed at "highly mobile professionals" who need to walk and compute at the same time; field inspectors, health workers, and government employees are among its primary markets. Xybernaut builds tabletlike functionality into its arsenal of "wearable" computers; in one such application, an Irish company called Adwalker equips its marketing reps with computers and flat-panel touch-screen monitors and sends them out to music festivals and the like, where they conduct research, dispense coupons and other information, and provide an "out-of-home" customer experience to anyone lucky enough to encounter this mobile marvel.

Despite those new frontiers, tablet sales haven't taken off, but the market may get a boost should a rumored Apple model appear later this year. Pundits suggest that such a device, aimed at consumers, would allow them to control an array of home electronics without having to leave the couch.

Downward Mobility: A Wi-Fi bye-bye

The combined muscle of IBM, Intel, and AT&T proved no match for free service, so last month the would-be Wi-Fi giant Cometa Networks announced it was shutting down. The joint venture had been built around the premise that a nationwide network of Wi-Fi "hot spots" (transmission sites that give users of wireless devices high-speed access to the internet as long as they are within a few hundred feet of a transmitter) would become a new (and profitable) form of telecom infrastructure in the US. But with Starbucks and other companies offering clients free use of hot spots, winning paying customers has proven difficult.

Even with free access to hot spots, which now number more than 40,000 nationwide, Wi-Fi usage has not taken off. Research firm In-Stat/MDR surveyed business travelers at the end of last year and found that the availability of Wi-Fi or other high-speed internet connectivity (such as the wired services offered by many hotels) would influence their choice of where to stay or visit - but only if the service were free. The average monthly fee paid by survey respondents for some sort of "visitor-based network" was a mere US$12.10. Jasbir Singh, president of Pronto Networks, says Cometa's demise owes more to its failure to build a big enough network fast enough. "They simply ran out of cash," he says, "but this won't affect the Wi-Fi market as a whole."

A Dream Deferred: Where the CFO would Like to Be

Many CFOs wish they were someplace else - namely, the corner office, if not as the full-time inhabitant then at least as a frequent visitor. That is, they'd like to spend more time advising the CEO on long-term strategy and less time analyzing costs, metrics, and the like.

So says a survey by CFO Research Services and Geac, which polled 140 senior finance execs across all industries on the topic of how they and their finance teams contribute to business strategy. While only 40 percent say they do, in fact, play that senior advisory role, nearly two-thirds hope to do so within two years. To free up that time, they'd like to spend less effort on costs, expenses, profitability measures, and the analysis that goes along with them.

But what sort of planning and advising would they like to do? Asked about their ability to create a plan to pursue promising opportunities, more than 40 percent rate their capabilities as "high" in the area of cost control, while approximately 34 percent give themselves that grade for organic growth and only 26 percent claim that status in the area of alliances/mergers and acquisitions. Maybe it's a matter of practice: fewer than 10 percent say they spend too much time on strategic planning, while more than half say they don't spend enough.