Finance organizations play an important role in evaluating software investments. Here are some suggestions on how to do this more effectively.

Hurricane season began last month, which serves as a good reminder to test your IT disaster recovery (DR) plans. Companies with an outdated DR plan can pay a big financial price. According to a new Symantec study, the average cost for each downtime incident is $287,600.

E-mail is a mission-critical application for companies, which means they need an e-mail archive system with fast message retrieval; fast, flexible, and comprehensive searching; and high reliability. There are two main e-mail archive options that companies should consider to prevent litigation and compliance headaches: license and purchase a system to run in-house or turn archiving over to an online application service provider in the cloud.

Social networking for businesses is taking off, as was evident at last month's Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, because it allows workers to collaborate and knowledge share. Where will it be most useful? Social software can be applied anywhere but will work especially well in the areas of budgeting, customer support, governance, and compliance.

A new study from the Ponemon Institute has found that employees are the biggest security threat to a company's data. The security breaches aren't being committed by disgruntled workers looking to bring down their company -- they're coming from workers who do things like share passwords and download data onto their unsecured mobile devices.

Integrated business planning (IBP) can increase your organization's financial return and improve its strategic position. Learn more by reading Ventana Research's report "Integrated Business Planning: Redesigning Planning for a More Dynamic Business Environment" in the BPM Resource Center.

The 6th Annual BPM Summit brought together some of the business world's foremost practitioners to explore the transformational role of finance in the enterprise. If you missed the live event, you can still enjoy access to the audio and slide shows from the keynote presentations at our on-demand archive.

How are treasury departments, now in the full glare of the corporate spotlights, marshaling their resources? What strategies and technologies are they mobilizing to keep the lifeblood of their organization flowing? Help us find out by participating in this 10-minute survey. And if you respond by July 24 you'll be entered into a drawing to win one of two $100 Visa gift cards!