Every year Beloit College releases its College Mind-set List just in time to greet incoming freshmen. Every CFO and business manager should read it because it gives you a glimpse at the future of your organization. These young people will, sooner than you think, become your employees and customers.

They will force you to change how you talk to them, manage them, and sell to them. These people, for example, almost never use conventional USPS mail and even avoid email as just too slow, according to the Beloit study. So, how will you communicate with them? Think social media or texting. They rarely use phone to just talk; yes, they are wedded to their cell phones but not necessarily for talking. As the Beloit researchers say: “The digital world is routine and technology is just too slow.” Here is an interesting study on social media trends, too.

These young people also have never known a world without the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Accommodating people with ramps and handicapped parking spaces is normal to them. Similarly, a quarter of these young people have at least one parent who is an immigrant. That will surely change the immigration discussion in your organization. more

On February 24, 2010, the SEC issued a Statement in Support of Convergence and Global Accounting Standards reiterating its belief “that a single set of high-quality globally accepted accounting standards will benefit U.S. investors ….” It reconfirmed that statement as recently as early August with its latest update.

A final decision on IFRS for the U.S. has NOT been issued. In fact, such a decision is not expected until 2011, after the efforts of several working groups have been reviewed and public comments assimilated. In Canada, however, IFRS is a done deal and the first compliance deadlines are approaching.

So, if IFRS happens, what is the implication for the technology infrastructure? “It will be huge,” observes Matthew J. Kinver, director of the IFRS practice at Sunera Business Consulting. more

A recent IBM survey found information governance emerging at the next big enterprise management trend. Of over 400 respondents to its information management study, 65 percent either had already implemented information governance or planned to do so by the end of 2011, while 70 percent expected information governance to grow in the next 3 to 5 years.

wiredFINANCE has covered aspects of information governance previously, as recently as a few weeks ago here. A failure of data governance can be quite costly. IBM reports that a large chemical manufacturer failed to destroy content and records in accordance with its corporate retention policy. So, during litigation the company had to spend over $12 million reviewing documents that should have been disposed of.

In response to the growing interest in information governance, IBM initiated an open information governance community. In addition to the survey, the company donated an open source model and some tools to the effort. More results from the survey follow. more

If your organization handles credit card data, there is no avoiding PCI. Most organizations treat it as an inconvenient fact of business life. They want to minimize the expense and effort of PCI compliance.

A month doesn’t go by that something isn’t in the news about PCI. Last month, it was reminders about the deadline to eliminate designated vulnerable PCI applications. That’s a serious concern. Click here for a list of these applications.

The goal of PCI efforts, however, should not be compliance for its own sake but better security of credit card information. It is about reducing risk to the organization and to the cardholders whose data is at risk. These are your customers. Losing sight of this goal leads organizations into making four critical mistakes, according to Tripwire, a PCI compliance tools provider. more

A survey by Symantec this past June revealed a significant gap between what managers say they want in terms of data retention and actual practices. In the survey, for example, 87 percent of respondents believe a retention policy should allow them to delete information without serious ramifications, mainly legal. However, less than 46 percent actually have an official retention plan.

Clearly there is a gap between what managers believe in regard to data retention and what they do, starting at the most basic level of having a data retention policy in the first place. In another example, just over half the respondents (51 percent) prohibit end-user (personal) archives. However, 65 percent report that end-users individually archive their data anyway.

Gaps or policy mismatches like these can lead to serious data retention mistakes that can have costly implications. wiredFINANCE has frequently argued that organizations simply keep too much data. The problem really comes down to a failure among business managers, legal, and IT to communicate around the issue of data retention. more