Financial Management and Accounting

Graduate School of Management and Technology

Announcements/News

Contributing to Green IT

CFOs and CIOs are working together to find ways by which IT security and audit management strategies reduce the IT carbon footprints of their organizations. Ways to contribute to green IT include:

• recycling shredded documents through secure outlets
• employing secure printing that requires users to enter a pin code to recover print jobs, limited access to intended recipients and allows untended print jobs to be easily deleted
• requiring night-time shutdown of desktops and laptops
• deleting all information from computers being decommissioned from networks
• disposing of computers and monitors at recycling or authorized disposal facilities
• mandating environmentally friendly hardware
• employing virtualized environments to run multiple applications and operating systems independently on a single server

Take the lead in helping your organization find these opportunities to contribute to green IT.

(Source: ISACA Journal, Volume I 2009)

Financial Modeling

In FIN 615, Financial Analysis and Modeling, we learn how to develop financial models and use them in analysis and financial decision-making. Financial models include financial statement proformas, budgets and forecasts, valuation and risk models, and ‘solver’ models that seek to find optimal solutions.  While developers strive to achieve maximum precision in modeling scenarios, when a model fails to predict, all tend to become suspect.  The underlying question is “Can models capture the uncertainty of people, events, and the interaction thereof”?  This is the related topic of a recent Business Week article entitled, Financial Models must be Clean and Simple (December 2008).  What do you think the answer is?  Yes, no, maybe?  To find out if your answer is in line with the authors’, read more in Financial Modeling.

Tech Knowledge Provides Career Edge

Finance and technology go hand-in-hand in companies today, a new survey confirms. Half (50 percent) of chief financial officers interviewed recently said that other than knowledge of accounting and finance, information technology experience is most useful in their careers. This result is nearly double the response when this question was asked five years ago.

Operations and legal experience also ranked high, with 45 percent and 37 percent of the response, respectively, according to the survey by Robert Half Management Resources. Sales and marketing rounded out the top four list with 26 percent of the response.

"Today's CFOs need expertise in many areas other than accounting and finance, but particularly in technology," said Paul McDonald, executive director of Robert Half Management Resources. "Companies increasingly expect their CFOs to provide insight into the value of new systems, evaluate the outcome of potential upgrades and make recommendations on technology-related investments."

McDonald also commented on the value of operations experience: "Finance chiefs are directly involved in all aspects of strategy and operations, providing direction on pricing, cost cutting and the restructuring of business units."

Source: SmartPros, August 28, 2008

CFOs and IM

The December 2007 issue of Financial Executive states “while businesses rely on the IT department and CIO/CTO for things technical, the CFO should be involved in key discussions associated with creating an information management strategy” (p. 44).  The CFO is responsible for ensuring that the organization’s information asset is organized and managed optimally.  Recommended best practices include:

• Build a study and scalable network
• Integrate business application software
• Secure the system from outside abuses
• Safeguard information from inside abuse
• Implement disaster planning and recovery

An organization’s IT plan supports its business objectives, and the CFO plays a significant role in its successful deployment.