We've made sure to put the right people in place and that we make strategic investments where we think we can get good returns. We're not just playing catch up. The CFO can't be solely focused on finance -- there has to be a balanced perspective.

Yes, and it's not the obvious one of Sarbanes-Oxley, although that is important to ensure that we have systems to capture, trap and provide lineage for data. Instead, I'd say this current shift to cloud computing where data is being moved outside of the organization's firewalls is a much bigger issue with much more long-term and profound implications for finance and IT.

From a business perspective, in many cases targeted, on-demand services are more cost-effective and provide more responsiveness to users. However, they pose problems for IT in trying to marry existing in-house infrastructure and the data within it to what's sitting in the cloud. IT may not care at first if a department signs up with a SaaS, but they will if that application becomes meaningful enough to the organization. Finance will also care because they need to ensure the security of the data and that there is a single version of the truth. You can't just say I'll rely on what's sitting on my in-house general ledger when everyone else is making decisions off a SaaS.