CFOs Race to Keep Up With New Technology

Computerworld - Walter Leen still remembers the days when the IT department was called data processing and it reported to the chief financial officer.

"It was just used as a big, fast calculator and a fast typewriter," Leen said, who recently retired from his job as vice president of internal auditing at Itasca, Ill.-based Enesco Group Inc. "But the CFOs had no idea of its capabilities to provide management information."

Now, CFOs - whose focus is often on the bottom-line results of specific markets but not the technological arcana that affect them - need to understand new tools that can give them a clearer picture of their companies' financial health, according to Ian Rubin, an analyst at IDC in Framingham, Mass.

E-commerce, mergers and acquisitions, and capital-intensive IT investments also require the CFO to stay on top of the latest technology trends.

That doesn't mean they have to know how to program a Web site, Rubin said, but the more they know about new technologies, the better positioned they are to judge the success of any particular project.

Willingness to Adapt

For example, San Rafael, Calif.-based Autodesk Inc., which sells AutoCAD and other design software, gets half of its business through the Web, said CFO Steve Cakebread. In addition, about a third of the company's suppliers take payments in electronic form.

"And we're always talking to our suppliers - 'You need to get more automated; your money is going to get to you faster,' " he said.

Dramatic growth, fueled by the Web, has also forced Lynn Atchison, CFO at business information provider Hoovers Inc. in Austin, Texas, to be more flexible in her job. "How do I, as a CFO, ensure that our site is going to produce revenues?" she asked. "One year, we think subscriptions are the main thing. The next, it's advertising. Now, I think it's gone full circle - back to subscriptions."

At a minimum, she said, today's CFOs need to understand the vocabulary of the Internet and how to use new technologies to launch a marketplace.

To help CFOs meet the increasing challenges of their jobs, IT departments need to take a more active role in educating them, said Anita Tilley, managing director of KPMG Consulting LLC in McLean, Va.

"Most finance departments that I have had the pleasure of working with have done a fairly good job of Finance 101 for their organizations," she said. "On the other hand, IT is dealing with a phenomenally fast-changing environment." However, IT organizations are starting to catch up, she