Do you use a smartphone at work? That’s an example of the consumerization of IT. Do you recruit employees or interact with customers through social media like Facebook? More consumerization of IT. How about invoicing and payment or procurement through cloud-based exchanges like Ariba? Same thing.

A Unisys study two years ago hinted at the consumerization of IT in business. An online poll of more than 500 enterprise information workers showed a majority prefer using their own PC or a hosted virtual desktop to do their work and to access information resources. Only a minority continues to subscribe to the traditional model of using a PC provided and managed by their company.

A more recent Unisys study in conjunction with IDC dubbed this trend Consumer-Powered IT, and already it is turning the traditional IT business model on its head. Unisys expects it will transform organizations over the next 3-5 years while bringing in a new wave of business productivity. Is Finance aware of and ready to capitalize on this new wave? more

Four times each year, the IRS publishes the Statistics of Income Bulletin. As you might guess, it contains a multitude of numbers detailing the numbers of returns and income reported. Among the highlights of the most recent Bulletin, from Summer 2011:

• Sole proprietorships: Nearly 22.7 million individual returns from 2009 reported income from non-farm sole proprietorships. While that was up slightly from 2008, the overall profits reported on the returns dropped by 7.4 percent, to about $245 billion. A nice sum, to be sure, although it works out to just under $11,000 per return. What’s more, this was the fourth year that profits, in constant dollars, had decreased since before 1988. When it came to total business receipts, the retail sector overtook construction for the top spot; retailers accounted for $179 billion in receipts. Construction was next, with receipts of $173 billion. For the construction industry, that represented a drop of more than 16 percent from 2008. The only two sectors in which receipts increased were health care and social assistance. more

Writing in Foreign Policy, the former inspector general of the National Security Agency identifies four ways the U.S. can bolster its defenses against cyber-security risks. Much of the guidance the author, Joel Brenner, provides also can help organizations shore up their own information security.

In fact, some of the keys steps identified in the article probably can be implemented within companies more easily than they can be put into place by the federal government.

“Companies that wait for the government to ‘solve’ their own security problems do so at their peril,” Brenner warns. Yet, his guidance is light on gloom and doom — and it sounds surprisingly straightforward to adhere to. “This is an old-fashioned management challenge — not a technological one,” Brenner asserts. more

IBM’s announced pending acquisition of Algorithmics is an important addition to the company’s portfolio of business applications aimed at financial services companies, and it is thematically consistent with its other acquisitions in risk management and analytics such as IBM’s OpenPages risk management documentation. It’s also a good fit for IBM’s professional services organization, which has a significant position in the financial services industry.

Analytic models are indispensable for supporting financial services operations and managing risk and regulatory compliance. Algorithmics has established a leadership position in this market with software that addresses a number of critical business needs in financial services, notably risk management for securities trading and credit, financial services operations management, collateral management, capital adequacy and liquidity risk management. The company has 350 customers and generated US$164 million in revenues in its September 2010 fiscal year. IBM indicated the Toronto-based company will continue to operate as an independent entity for the time being. more

It has been said that one should not look too closely at how laws and sausages are made. In the recent case of Freda v. Commissioner, the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals dealt with both.

The taxpayer, C&F Packing Company, Inc., had developed a process for making and freezing pre-cooked sausage that was indistinguishable from home-cooked sausage. Under a licensing and confidentiality agreement, C&F allowed Pizza Hut to use the process. Pizza Hut failed to purchase sufficient quantities of sausage from C&F and allegedly divulged crucial information about C&F’s processes to a competitor. C&F sued both Pizza Hut and the competitor for misappropriation of trade secrets. C&F won the case against the competitor and settled with Pizza Hut for a net $6.12 million. more