The world has gone crazy over mobile—and finance is no exception. Mobile solutions have the capability to transform the way we operate, manage, and monitor the workplace. For finance in particular, “the immediacy of information that can be received, processed, analyzed, and then pushed back out—with all of this done remotely—is the real opportunity,” said Lawrence Maisel, founder the performance management consultancy DecisionVu.

A scary thought for many finance professionals is utilizing cloud computing for finance functions. Benefits of cloud computing are clear: documents can be modified from anywhere at any time by anyone (with access) on any device. Though less of a new concept for other parts of an organization, some finance people cringe at the thought of storing sensitive, business-critical documents such as financial forecasts on third-party servers. A major concern is, “how secure is this?”

Think of the gamut of process management capabilities required to get real work done. Now imagine if you only had paper and pen, filing cabinets, the postal service (for normal communications) or a very expensive overnight delivery service for items needing rapid attention. More time would be spent filing, collating, spindling, or otherwise shuffling documents as they travel physically around your organization and potentially around the world. Imagine how long it would take to effect change!

Over the past few weeks, several of our members have asked me whether APQC has any articles on selecting software to support KM approaches. In general, APQC aims to be vendor-neutral, and we don’t promote specific software solutions. However, we do have some articles on what to keep in mind when building or buying applications to enable knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Here are some general articles about selecting tools for KM: