An economic rebound is coming sooner rather than later, according to a survey of CFOs and CEOs at software firms released today by Intacct, the SaaS financial management software provider. You can get a copy of the survey here. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t take a survey of software company executives seriously (unless it was about software development, of course).

However, one particular finding suggests that they may be onto something: The survey reported that 90 percent of the companies have already begun to hire and are planning to increase headcount during the upcoming year. Software companies are notorious for being quick to fire, but if they are hiring, something must be going on.

But assuredly this isn’t the last word. A Towers Watson survey conducted in January 2010 found that 85 percent of the businesses surveyed plan modest hiring for new positions in 2010 (92 percent in the U.S.). However, over a third expect to make targeted workforce reductions (down from 58 percent in the U.S. since the financial crisis began).

Still, at some point the economy is bound to start on a road, fast or slow, to recovery. When this happens, here are six things you can have IT focus on to improve your chances of success when customers start spending again.

1. Refresh your website. Whether it is a transaction site or just an electronic billboard, freshen it up, make it more interactive, give it some Web 2.0 collaborative features. Remember, it’s 2010.

2. Revamp your business processes by adding automated workflow and collaboration capabilities. Aim to speed processes, do things in parallel, and enable customer, partner, and employee self-service as much as practical.

3. Upgrade your server and storage environment, especially replacing technology over three years old. If nothing else, this will get you more resources and faster performance and reduce energy consumption. While you’re at it, check out what the cloud offers by way of compute and storage resources.

4. Rationalize and modernize your applications with an eye toward replacing aging in-house applications with the latest SaaS offerings. At worst, the costs will be a wash and you’ll end up with the latest features and capabilities with minimal effort. At best, it will lower your costs and improve your performance.

5. Enhance your business intelligence (BI) portal or create one. The data your organization collects every day can be one of your most valuable assets but only if your people can get to it easily and in a way they can understand. If you don’t have BI capabilities, get some. Here again, you can look for SaaS and cloud BI offerings.

6. Standardize and simplify your IT infrastructure. Rationalize the number of products, applications, tools, operating systems, and vendors you have to manage and support. Hopefully, you did this in suggestions 3 and 4. If not, do it now.

All of this shouldn’t cost much more than you’ve been spending already — and possibly less. And since this is predicated on the economy improving, you’ll have more revenue to work with. Happy recovery! ###