Finance organizations that have incorporated green IT practices into their operations achieve more than a pat on the back for saving the world. They stand to save significant money through lower energy bills and ensure that they continue in business when economic growth (eventually) returns.

According to an EPA report to Congress in 2007, an IT data center consumes as much as 25 times more energy than a typical office building. The obvious conclusion: Energy efficiency efforts aimed at IT pay off bigger than those targeted elsewhere in the office.

Finance generally isn’t considered an IT energy hog. However, it can be. End-of-month or -quarter closings can make large demands on the IT systems. Similarly, the annual budget marathon can strain IT systems. Finally, sophisticated risk analysis, such as complex Monte Carlo simulations, can run for days and bring even powerful servers to their knees. So, the finance department isn’t completely blameless when it comes to running up IT energy bills. more

Companies usually have no trouble spending money. But managing what amounts to widely dispersed and often invisible spending presents a challenge to any CFO. At even the best managed companies, ad hoc spending can run rampant.

Technology promises a solution, although even the need defies easy categorization. You’ll find it labeled spend management, procurement management, e-procurement, e-sourcing, contract lifecycle management (CLM), supplier performance management, supplier network management, or, best yet, accounts payable-electronic invoice presentment and payment (AP-EIPP). And the tools often are buried within large, more cumbersome products, like ERP systems.

Both Gartner, with its Magic Quadrant for Sourcing Application Suites, 2008, and Forrester Research, with its Predictions 2009: ePurchasing Market, have tackled this subject. more

How do you share information with third parties during due diligence? In the past, companies set up a secure physical data room and all the parties came with their cartons of documents. Even today, many ship data CDs via FedEx. Most exchange email with attachments among the various parties. Email attachments are utterly insecure in most cases.

EURIM, the European Information Society Group, published a report some years ago touting online document sharing as the wave of the future, even for confidential information. EURIM’s focus primarily was on government agencies. One of its conclusions: “Advances in computing, particularly in networking and security, are making it possible to reduce identity theft through secure data sharing.”

That might not sound reassuring to CFOs faced with sharing sensitive information during the M&A process, compliance audits, and such. Data theft more than identify theft is their immediate concern. Nobody wants their financials, business strategies, customer lists, unannounced product specs, or anything else compromised. more

Did IBM expect to kick off a storm with what appeared to be an innocuous document called the Open Cloud Manifesto? All the company intended, according to the IBM spokesman who circulated the manifesto, was to “initiate a conversation that will bring together the emerging cloud community (both cloud users and cloud suppliers) around a core set of principles.”

Microsoft, which has its own cloud initiative in the works, immediately went ballistic. Google appeared to sign on initially but reportedly has backed out. Cisco, another initial signer of the manifesto, may pull out, too. Amazon.com, probably the biggest cloud player to date, never signed on board in the first place.

Increasingly, financial applications and the IT infrastructure to support finance will be coming from the cloud. NeoSystems, for example, is putting Lumigent’s AppGRC product in the cloud and delivering it as a SaaS offering. more

IBM’s Mark Lynch tells the anecdote of an organization that had five business units sharing a piece of its IT infrastructure. When it came time to allocate costs, each unit was charged 20 percent. Only after managers had applied an automated usage tracking system did they discover that one unit was consuming 60 percent of the resources.

Do you know what each business unit is consuming in terms of IT resources? Many organizations don’t even bother to track it. Rather, they just divide the cost equally between the business units. It’s simple, easy, makes sense, and seems fair. Unfortunately, it often is wrong.

Even in this recession, both IDC and Gartner project IT spending worldwide to increase, albeit at low single-digit rates, for the next few years. Not surprisingly, IT asset management has emerged as a critical discipline as IT usage and the corresponding expenditures balloon. As expected, there even is an association that focuses on the practice, the International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers, Inc. more