A pair of recent surveys by Adaptive Planning, in conjunction with the BPM Forum, suggests more than half of financial executives are bracing for another downturn, a double dip recession. The first survey from February shows 51 percent expecting a W-shaped (double dip) recovery. For 67 percent, any meaningful improvement in jobs won’t happen until 2011.

The second survey, conducted a few months later, showed similar results, which suggests that the economy has stabilized. “People expected improvement, but clearly it is not happening as fast as they hoped,” commented Bill Soward, Adaptive Planning CEO.

The latest bouncing around of the major stock indices considerably below their highs for the year, along with European debt problems and the Gulf oil disaster, only add to the gloom. Still, Soward suggests that there are steps financial managers should take to navigate this bumpiness. more

The killer application — the capability that makes a technology irresistible in the enterprise — for the PC was VisiCalc, the original spreadsheet. The killer application for networking is email, which has become mission-critical in many companies. The killer application for the Worldwide Web is e-commerce. So, what’s the killer application for social networking and social media?

The Enterprise 2.0 conference just wrapped up in Boston. Some big vendors — IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Novell — were there, along with a slew of small players and start-ups. The conference reeked of unrestrained enthusiasm for social networking in the enterprise.

Declared Tony Zingale, CEO of Jive: “Social business is the most important new enterprise software category in a decade. The innovation of social in the consumer space has had a ripple effect in the enterprise, forcing mass adoption of social business practices.” And what exactly is this killer app? It’s not that the various speakers didn’t offer an answer; each just had a different answer. more

CFOs frequently ask me what the best computer for their business is. This usually occurs when they are scratching their heads over a budget request from their IT folks. This is an impossible question, similar to the question: What is the best car?

When you are a young, single guy, you would give one answer to the “best car” question; when you are a middle-age dad with four kids, you give a completely different answer. The same holds true when determining the best computer for your business. The only correct answer: It depends …

Writing for Efficient Enterprise, I recently tackled this question in a different form. Here, the IT people were trying to make sense of a slew of new servers based on the latest chip technology. However, there is a pretty straightforward way for the CFO to make sense of computer technology requests without having to wade into the techno-babble of it all. And CFOs do need to make sense of IT, which can have significant impact on the balance sheet. more

How do you take your offshore outsourcing? Most North American companies continue to go far offshore to Asia, mainly India. The reason is simple: The price per unit of work is less than it is here in North America or even near shore, in Mexico or Latin America.

Increasingly, however, organizations are turning to near shore options, despite the somewhat higher price, to take advantage of other factors. Stephanie Overby, writing last year in CIO, identified six offshore outsourcing hot spots, including Latin America. Global Services Media looked at 50 outsourcing destinations, ranking Brazil, a near shore location, fifth behind India, Philippines, China, and Ireland.

Offshore outsourcing is a game of geographic labor arbitrage. The best players in the game hedge their bets, suggests John Parkinson, managing director of Parkwood Advisors and former CTO of TransUnion, a major user of offshore outsourcing, by using both near shore and far shore options, depending on the needs of the project. more

Remember the B2B commerce exchanges of a decade ago? At one point, new exchanges were popping up almost weekly.

By 2002, the concept was dead. Mohanbir Sawhney, writing in CIO Magazine in 2002, penned a eulogy here: “Just two years ago, business-to-business trading exchanges were the rage. Experts, including myself, waxed eloquent about the potential of B2B exchanges to act as hubs, connecting buyers and sellers in electronic marketplaces. Of course, we were all very wrong. Now, most B2B exchanges are either dead or on life support. However, it’s not the concept of the exchange that is flawed but the execution of that concept.”

The idea of using the Internet to mediate commerce between companies didn’t die completely. Some players, like Ariba, survived to introduce a cloud-based version, the Ariba Commerce Cloud. Validating the concept, IBM just dropped $1.4 billion to acquire Sterling Commerce, another old B2B exchange player. The value for CFOs lies in where and how this concept can save money. more