Forum on Finance and Technology.

• Position: Conferences

FEI's annual Forum on Finance and Technology was held September 18-20 in Las Vegas, and featured a high-powered lineup of speakers, including Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers and Hector de Ruiz, president and CEO of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Attendance was the highest ever for the conference, according to event chairman Carry Lowenthal, executive managing director of the Metropolitan Group in Minneapolis.

The conference kicked off Thursday, September 19, at the Venetian Hotel and Casino with a broad challenge to current strategic thinking from Daniel Burrus, president and CEO of Burrus Research Associates Inc. Burrus argued that while many things are uncertain following 9/11, others things are perhaps more certain -- like the value of relationships and trust. Finding a way to increase trust is vital, he said, adding, "It's not what you do, but how you do it."

Burrus urged the audience of some 260 finance officers to seek new forms of advantage, and to create "new cash cows" from their company's core competencies. Customers are consistently underutilizing technology they've purchased, and providers need to find ways to empower them to use those tools more effectively and in ways they may not have thought of. "E-enablement" will improve dramatically in coming years, he said, as people, strategy and process get better integrated.

In a second keynote speech, John Connors, CFO of Microsoft Corp., gave a wide-ranging and provocative talk about the state of technology and Microsoft's future. Connors noted that at a time of negative growth for personal computers, Microsoft now finds itself forced to "grind out" growth. He noted a couple of specific challenges the company faced this past year, including the launch of products like Xbox, the video game system, that were costly and are not yet profitable. Connors said the software giant has been redesigning its internal organization to become more decentralized. In fact, it has created seven distinct business units with separate profit-and-loss centers.

The Microsoft CFO called the first 10 years of this century "the digital decade," saying that Microsoft is making a huge bet with its .NET architecture, which will allow programmers to develop applications for the Web more rapidly and more systematically. "Developer productivity is a key competitive advantage for any company," he said.

Connors recited four key principles that he said Microsoft is committed to: 1) using small groups of its best people...