Sarbanes-Oxley touched off a scramble to tighten the connections between tax and finance along the reporting axis, and since then other area of integration have been receiving increased attention, notably systems architecture and process design. But finance-tax integration is still a long way behind where it needs to be, especially at the level of enterprise technology and data exchange. In fact, the growing complexity of both the finance and tax functions in increasingly globalized organizations is actually driving them further apart, according to a new white paper from PricewaterhouseCoopers. more

The usual way managers assess the value of an IT initiative is through ROI. It has become the standard metric for picking one IT project over another or for determining the success of an IT effort. ROI has become so pervasive in determining IT value that I have put my daughters through college, in large part, by doing ROI analyses for technology vendors; see my Ultimate ROI Guide.

ROI certainly works for stand-alone IT projects. The approach, however, does not work particularly well for long-duration, ongoing IT efforts that may serve multiple uses and span decades, suggests Miko Matsumura, chief strategist at Software AG.

Matsumura calls his preferred approach “return on assets” (ROA). This is not exactly your accountant’s ROA. It is more like a determination, partly metaphorical, of determining the lifetime value delivered by an IT investment. more

The SEC has proposed to amend its rules to “enhance the compensation and corporate governance disclosures registrants are required to make about: their overall compensation policies and their impact on risk-taking; stock and option awards of executives and directors; director and nominee qualifications and legal proceedings; company leadership structure; the board’s role in the risk management process; and potential conflicts of interest of compensation consultants that advise companies.”

What does this (potentially) mean? more

Clearly, funding has been hard to come by as of late. And, time always is in short supply. Even so, lots of cash and unlimited amounts of time aren’t always needed to make money, as this project assigned to students at Stanford University demonstrates.

Several years ago, Tina Seelig, executive director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and author of What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World (HarperCollins 2009), was trying to figure out how she could best convey the concept of entrepreneurship to her students. So, she divided students into about a dozen teams of four or five each, handed each team $5 — that’s not a typo — in seed money and gave them two hours to come up with a plan for making money. They then had several days to execute their idea. more

I am sure most of us have played Scrabble when an unsavory opponent proposes a blatant “made up” word that is worth 100 points. We smile with comfort that the rules or “order” say No, Not so fast, let’s consult the dictionary. What about today’s real world? Who took my dictionary, as the analogy goes?

Is your company finding it hard to make decisions in light of the current imbalance between order and disorder? A simple description of “order” exists when contracts, agreements, and partnerships are predictable and honored by their respective parties. An equally simple description of “dis-order” is when those basic business principles are broken. Today, is DIS-ORDER trumping ORDER? Yes. more