Last week, I got a call from Eric Krell, who also blogs in this space for Business Finance. He had been hired by a professional association to research the question: What will the finance function look like in the year 2020? He figured that because I have spent years writing about the role and people of finance, I’d make a good mark.

I do not opine about finance in the cloud and that sort of thing. But I do, always, wonder about finance/accounting people and their skills sets and how they evolve in response to changing business conditions and investor appetites for risk and reward. 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

How does a company within the hyper-competitive realm of Internet networking services succeed? By involving corporate finance very early in the sales and service process, according to Mark Peters, executive vice president and CFO of tw telecom.

“The finance department gets embedded early on in evaluating how we are going to work with the customer,” Peters explains. “The rules of engagement are established up front so that we’re not reacting our way through each deal.”

I recently interviewed Peters for Business Finance, and our Q&A session here contains insights on how tw telecom eliminated their annual budgets and moved to the use of a rolling forecast and a robust communication strategy to position finance to support operations in a way that helps the company thrive in a tough market. ###