In its latest study, IBM dubs the CFO “the new value integrator.” Think about that the next time you bump into the CIO. Check out IBM’s full CFO study here, along with a ton of related content, including a discussion forum and video.

Here’s IBM’s rationale: Value integrators are skilled at navigating uncertainty, and on every measure that IBM examined – revenue growth, EBITDA, and return on invested capital – their enterprises outperformed their peers’. They do so in large part because they excel at integrating information company-wide, analyzing it, and converting it to a competitive asset – new intelligence.

Pretty heady stuff, until IBM adds: “Our study also shows that too many finance organizations have yet to seize this opportunity – or meet their own [or maybe IBM’s] expectations.” Let’s take a look at some of the key findings. more

A recent piece from Jake Swearington cites a survey of 1,600 executives by William Baker, a professor of marketing at San Diego State University, which found that those firms that rely heavily on external social networks scored 24 percent higher on a measure of radical innovation than companies that don’t.

Late in January, wiredFINANCE looked at the suggestion that social networking for business is “cr*p” and found that there actually can be something of value for business in social networking. Months earlier, wiredFINANCE found that budgeting and any collaborative financial process, such as accounts receivable, could benefit from social networking.

Even my colleagues at Business Finance Magazine have recently created a Linked-in page and a Twitter page. What’s more, BF’s editor in chief Jack Sweeney and managing editor John Cummings have begun tweeting daily. Clearly, Social media/networking also can do good things for the business itself. more

Why do you need a physical office for finance? If you can’t provide a good answer to that question, your organization might very well benefit from a virtual finance office.

Telecommuting is the key to establishing a virtual finance department. Through telecommuting, secure online collaboration and document-sharing space, and using financial applications delivered through the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model—all issues previously discussed here—you don’t need a physical finance office at all. In fact, your organization might not need a physical office for any department—marketing, sales, IT, customer service, R&D, HR—but certainly finance could easily lead by example.

Driven by the poor economy and the need to cut expenses, companies are turning to telecommuting and virtual offices as a way to lower costs and boost productivity. As SonicWall, a virtual private network (VPN) provider, notes in a recent report, “increasingly, financial considerations such as gas prices, the credit crisis, and hard cost savings drive telecommuting programs.” Almost any business can capture these benefits. more

Have you figured out what your next PC will be? I’m willing to bet it won’t be a desktop machine. You probably won’t even get another laptop when you retire your current one. Then what, a netbook? Possibly. The smart money, however, is betting your next computing device will be a mobile phone, specifically a new smartphone.

A year ago, Gartner predicted that corporate America will be supporting more mobile phones than desktop phones by 2011. “The adoption and standardization of corporate-liable mobile phones in the enterprise has been driven by the use of smartphones, wireless e-mail, and the integration of these phones into IP telephony systems,” according to Phil Redman, research vice president at Gartner. The telcos and phone makers are further fueling the trend with each new product release.

If business executives are getting new smartphones, they also won’t be needing their old desktop and laptop PCs. For the kind of work most executives do, a smartphone with access to the wealth of SaaS applications may be enough. more

According to a recent IBM report, leading companies are three times more effective in collecting and leveraging information than the laggards in their markets. Analytics has replaced intuition for business decision-making through what IBM dubs business analytics and optimization (BAO).

The IBM report, titled “Breaking Away with Business Analytics and Optimization,” describes three ways leading companies use data to separate themselves from the pack: 1) disrupting the status quo, 2) anticipating the future, and 3) empowering workers to make decisions based on information.

Top performers, IBM continues, are eight times more likely to pursue information-led transformation at an enterprise level than underperformers. The laggards sit around the conference table, each manager with his/her own spreadsheet, arguing over whose data is right. Where does your company fit in? more