If you’re inclined to regularly check the pulse of the latest business thinking (I am, thank you very much, though I still cringe at the term “thought leadership”), you know that decision-making is a Hot Topic.

Check out the business book best-sellers, scan the abstracts of the latest research reports by business school professors, or tune in to the latest collection of TED Conference videos (definitely do the latter), and human decision-making is featured prominently. more

Everyone in business seems to be having extreme difficulty in accurately forecasting in today’s economic turmoil. A recent issue of INC. magazine featured an article titled “Forecasting in a Crazy, Mixed-up World” (April 2009, pp. 19-20).

Readers answered the question, “What is the hardest part of owning a business right now?” The number one response was “It’s impossible to forecast accurately.” Unfortunately, this is true for owners and senior managers no matter what the size of their organization.

It is particularly true for those of you who are preparing for the annual budgeting ritual. At most companies, Financial Planning and Analysis managers are busy developing their upcoming planning points and guidelines. more

Think about how many different communications systems, service providers, devices, interfaces, and more your customers, staff, and partners have to muddle through to complete something. How much is it costing you to cobble together all those pieces and keep them functioning as things change? And how much revenue are you losing when things fall through the cracks or messages get dropped, lost, garbled, or otherwise mishandled?

Unified communications (UC) promises a seamless flow of voice, data, video, and applications across different networks, protocols, vendors, and devices as if it were all one. Heating up the UC market are Cisco, IBM, and Microsoft aggressively staking out their UC turf.

According to the International Engineering Consortium, UC refers to all forms of call, multimedia, and cross-media message management functions controlled by an individual for business purposes, including enterprise informational and transactional applications. UC encompasses unified messaging, where voice, fax, IM, and text messages are accessed via a single mailbox; collaboration and interaction systems; real-time and near real-time communications; and communications-enabled applications. more

Conventional wisdom focused on strategic planning as a static, annual process that would flow through the budgeting and operational planning processes. However, we are not in traditional times. More often, companies are taking notice of current conditions that have rendered assumptions in these plans obsolete, and are going back to the drawing board.

For instance, did your strategic plan contemplate the government takeover of numerous banks, nearly the entire sector? Did GM in the auto sector mean Government-Managed when you prepared your SWOT analysis? Did your ERM contemplate current default rates on homes, cars, and commercial real estate? Did your global plan include recessions in nearly all markets or did it foresee a balanced portfolio in these markets?

What we are seeing is a more dynamic strategic planning process taking into consideration more current, relevant, leading market indicators, with near-term planning horizons. Is this correct? Time will tell. However, CPOs and their C-Suite colleagues are no longer waiting until next year to reformulate. Next year is now! ###

Outsourcing/offshoring may be staying closer to home these days to take advantage of plentiful surplus talent. Meanwhile, overall outsourcing growth will slow due to reduced spending and global uncertainty, according to the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals. Outsourcing vendors, however, continue to rack up big wins in 2009. For example:

• IBM will handle the management and storage of most of Kaiser Permanente’s data.

• Wipro Ltd. won a 9-year outsourcing contract from Unitech Wireless.

• HP won a 10-year, $1 billion data center services contract from Aviva, a large U.K. insurer, to retool and operate data centers there.

Outsourcing is not a surefire way to reduce IT spending, as we noted here previously. Before you consider outsourcing, which can demoralize and disrupt your organization and still not produce the results or savings you want, try the five steps below to revitalize your current IT operation and make it competitive with outsourcing vendors. more