Because of the pressures of compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, managers are now looking for good advice on how to reduce information risk and manage the end-user development hydra. This Advisor suggests how IT managers can help users to improve their process so that they save time by making fewer mistakes and endure less of the pain and cost of bad practice.

Although risk management is seen as a vital, integrated part of a project manager's skills, even in today's fast-paced, results-oriented environment, formal risk management for IT outsourcing is rare.

There are three kinds of knowledge. Generic, structured knowledge includes facts, concepts, principles, and formulae that describe what things are and how they work. Finance is a good generic, structured field. Computer science is another one. College students major in these fields.

About three weeks ago, GEAC announced it was buying financial analytics applications vendor Comshare, Inc. This week, the consolidation of the business intelligence (BI) market continues with recent announcements that Business Objects is buying Crystal Decisions, Inc. and that Hyperion Software is buying Brio Technology.