Project

Business process improvements, customer relationship management and business analytics are high on CIOs' to-do lists this year.

Project #10: Financial reporting

Participants: The place where the CIO's world intersects most closely with the CFO's.

Price tag: Most companies now spend about 5% of their I.T. budget on compliance.

At most organizations, particularly big public companies, Sarbanes-Oxley has focused attention on systems for financial reporting. The idea is to capture financial data rigorously and have a single view of it, so things are locked down if the Securities and Exchange Commission comes calling. "Everything ends up in Finance," says Par Pharmaceutical CIO Wolfson.

That may be true, but technologists' approaches to fulfilling their responsibilities in this area vary widely. While there are some CIOs who prefer to keep it simple—doing everything with financial software from SAP or PeopleSoft—others opt for a best-of-breed approach.

Wolfson, for instance, says she may use Hyperion as a financial data warehouse but turn to the analytical software company SAS for forecasting and other functions.