Finance / Opinions

Under CIO Victor Fetter's leadership at LPL Financial, the IT group has moved from 'working on projects' to delivering solutions that shape the business and the marketplace.

NASA's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) recently audited and evaluated the efficacy of the space agency's efforts to adopt cloud-computing technologies. The resulting report, "NASA's Progress in Adopting Cloud-Computing Technologies," includes six recommendations "to strengthen NASA's IT governance practices with respect to cloud computing, mitigate business and IT security risks and improve contractor oversight." While the recommendations are specific to NASA, their underlying concepts can be leveraged by any organization that wants to more effectively adopt cloud-computing services.

With massive amounts of data, low latency, hundreds of connection points and no margin for error, financial trading is grown-up IT. Liquidnet does it in more than 40 markets with a staff of just 300. Here's how the company makes it work.

From time to time, organizations are asked to provide access to data for legal reasons. Those requests can be more complicated when the data is in the cloud. But a new report sheds some light on one critical aspect of such requests.

Someone at my seminar in Los Angeles last month asked about challenges that the cloud poses for software licensing. That's such a broad and complex topic that it could warrant an entire seminar of its own. But this column can at least provide an overview of the issues.

There's no CEO 101 course that outlines the best way to run a tech company. But the legacies of Jobs, Watson, Gerstner and Gates--combined with the current work of Whitman and Rometty--offer seven lessons for the corporate leaders of tomorrow.

Hewlett-Packard shouldn't be succeeding. It's spread itself too thin by competing in too many markets. But the company's turnaround actually seems to be working, and a focus on employees seems to be doing the trick.

The fact that regulations evolve at a much slower pace than cloud computing technologies can lead to confusion regarding how to meet regulatory requirements in the cloud. If a client moves a regulated function to the cloud and later falls out of compliance due to a shortcoming on the cloud vendor's part, the client remains accountable. So it's essential to have as much clarity on these issues as possible. Recognizing this challenge with regards to the handling of credit card data, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council has recently issued guidance on how to apply PCI Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) in the cloud.

According to MIT Sloan, the global customer relationship management (CRM) market exceeds $50 billion annually and yet consistently 55-75 per cent of implementations fail to meet the expectations of business stakeholders. There are case studies of successful CRM projects, but it raises the question of the validity of building silos of customer data in the belief that it adds intrinsic value to the enterprise balance sheet or the customer experience. Will emerging technologies change the way we think about managing customer relationships and interactions?

Short-term cuts are easy; but making them stick is more difficult. Sales, general and administrative (often grouped as ‘SGA’) prove to be particularly intransigent. While manufacturing efficiencies have improved in recent years, SGA has remained more or less at same levels.