How many of your financial processes are structured? Not many, I bet. More likely, to get something done you fire off an email message to somebody who then fires off messages to others. Eventually a message may get back to you with the information you wanted or that some task has been completed (or not completed). That’s an unstructured process, and it is the way most knowledge workers function today.

Gartner’s Jim Sinur, in a recent blog, describes it as such: “Unstructured process is where the process map is more variable and in some cases only pictured after the fact. … There generally is not a process flow per se.”

Whatever the unstructured process flow is, you won’t really know until it is done, if even then, and it is unlikely to be repeated exactly the same way. Not only is it unstructured, but it is ad hoc. This makes unstructured processes very difficult to manage. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be managed. The question is how. more

Almost every organization outsources some IT. A few outsource everything. Most outsource some IT functions.

How much IT you outsource and which particular IT functions says something about the organization. According to The Hackett Group, a financial research firm, “the percentage of outsourced cost in the total process cost … is an important and closely watched metric. World-class companies out­source a substantially larger portion of their IT processes [44.5% compared to 30.2%] than peer group compa­nies: close to half of all their technology infrastructure-related processes.”

And outsourcing decisions are only going to get more complicated as SaaS, cloud computing, and new technology licensing, pricing, and deployment models evolve. This further raises “the importance of IT sourcing on the strategic IT agenda,” according to Hackett researchers. more

Finance departments have used portal technology for a decade or more. It proved a natural for all those pesky questions from employees about compensation, from executives and managers seeking access to financial data, and from customers and suppliers about billing and payment. So here is the question: What does social networking technology bring to portals?

We’re going to find out. IBM is pushing the portal in the cloud as the combination of the classic information portal and Web 2.0 technology, something it will be unveiling in stages over the next year. Microsoft is doing the same.

Gartner confirms the trend in its most recent portal software Magic Quadrant. According to Gartner, “New [portal] entrants provide additional options for enterprises willing to consider open-source and software-as-a-service alternatives for portal functionality. To differentiate their offerings, portal vendors are incorporating support for enterprise mashups and social networking.” IBM is even working with Amazon to enable private cloud-based portals. more

Hurricane season began last month, which serves as a good reminder to test your disaster recovery (DR) plans. Traditional IT practice calls for testing DR plans annually. However, things change during the year, things that easily trip up a DR effort.

If you needed another reminder, Symantec just released its 2009 disaster recovery survey, its fifth such report. Some of the results may surprise you. For example, the cost per incident averaged $287,000, and 93 percent of the 1,650 organizations surveyed worldwide actually had to execute on their DR plans. Of those, 25 percent failed, a pretty sobering number.

In terms of budget, just over half the respondents reported that budgets would remain the same. Looking out two years, the respondents split, with a few percentage points more seeing the DR budget increase while an almost equal amount expected a decrease. more

There is the email archiving you do to meet various compliance mandates, and then there is the rest that everyone does. Most people do this kind of email archiving manually through their Microsoft Outlook folders.

This is not the best approach. A recent Gartner report on email archiving points out: “Demand for email active archiving products and services continues to escalate, as pure financial industry compliance considerations are being replaced by the broader market requirements for message retention, mail server management, and legal discovery support.”

“The email archive, for better or worse, has become a rich trove of business knowledge that, if mined and managed effectively, becomes a powerful business tool or, if allowed to run rampant without any controls, can be a litigation minefield. (See wiredFINANCE, Mar. 17, “Delete Data to Minimize Litigation Costs.”) As Gartner says, “Most organizations should be doing some kind of email archiving.” more