One of the ironies of being a top finance leader is that seldom if ever will you be heralded for your vast technical skills. Instead, you are more likely to be praised for having keen management skills or even imagination.

The likely reason for this is that while technical skills are clearly how finance executives distinguish themselves beginning day one of their careers, it is the executive’s ability to manage people and perform creative problem-solving that ultimately leads them down the CFO path. more

Beyond Budgeting’s 9th Annual Conference will start today in Dallas at the Omni Park West Hotel.

This year’s conference features the largest group of hands-on implementers ever assembled. These practitioners include Nevine White of tw telecom and John Hrudicka of Elkay.

White and Elkay join an expanding roster of deployment practitioners, including Bjarte Bogsnes from Statoil and David Cooke, formerly of Park Nicollet Health Systems. It’s great to hear how these companies are transforming into forward-looking, Future Ready organizations.

The conference’s theme is “Future Ready: Seeing through the Fog.” When I originally selected the title, I figured that we would be either be slogging thought a lingering recession or trying to see forward as we emerged from it. That foresight has turned out to be fairly close.

What I didn’t envision was that my coauthor, Steve Morlidge (with whom I am scheduled to jointly present both the opening presentation in Thursday and a three-hour workshop on Friday), would be stuck in the UK with thousands of other travelers. more

Hackett Group research suggests that application portfolio management is the key to a number of good things you want from IT, including improved effectiveness, cost reduction, and better partnering with the business. The trick lies in reducing the number of applications in the portfolio.

Top-performing IT organizations, according to Hackett, operate with nearly half the applications per thousand end-users of typical companies. You can find the study here.

Gartner suggests that IT application portfolio management is particularly useful in the current economic climate. In its 2009 project and portfolio management Magic Quadrant, the researchers noted: “Many companies shifted into a cost-optimization mode, looking for ways to cut costs, refocus priorities, and shift spending in many areas, including IT. These companies also sought to apply more accountability and governance to the definition, selection, and execution of strategic as well as tactical IT investments.” Good things to keep doing even as the economy begins to improve. more

In its latest attempt to beat back the pack of states bent on imposing sales taxes on Internet retailers, Amazon.com has filed suit against North Carolina’s department of revenue, which it claims is threatening the company with an administrative summons and contempt proceeding for refusing to turn over the names and addresses of its customers as well as records of what they bought and how much they paid. more

Interest rate and credit risk are most common; agricultural commodity and market risk most significant.

If the economic upheaval of the past year and a half has taught us anything, it’s that risk isn’t something to be taken lightly. A survey of more than 200 corporate finance execs conducted by AFP in November 2009 shows which financial risks are most common across many organizations, as well as those that are most significant. Interestingly, some risks that were relatively less common nonetheless could have a significant impact on those organizations that had to deal with them. The survey also delved into the tools organizations are using to manage financial risks.

Interest rate risk was the most common, with more than four in five respondents reporting some exposure to it. Not surprising when you consider that commercial paper rates for nonfinancial companies have fallen from about 5 percent in early 2007 to near zero today.

On the other hand, while almost all companies have to manage this risk, only 11 percent of respondents said that it could have a significant impact on their organization’s profitability. In fact, for 38 percent of respondents, the potential impact was either not significant or was only minimally significant. Nearly three-quarters of respondents use over-the-counter swaps to handle interest rate risk. more