I have discovered a fatal disease that appears to afflict some organizations that try to practice risk management. This malady is an odd form of myopia. Those infected with it can only see small problems in projects. Large problems looming directly ahead, problems that would be in the center of any healthy project's field of vision, go completely unseen by the victims of this disease.

In the late 1990s, Congress passed a law that required that US government agencies adopt enterprise architectures and subsequently use those architectures when they propose new programs. In essence, Congress wanted to see what IT resources government agencies were using, with an eye to identifying duplication and eliminating inefficiencies.

One reader wrote me that his company is in the process of selecting a packaged data warehouse and accompanying analytic applications. The company has developed an initial list of products that meet its requirements. Now it wants to narrow the list, and the reader asked me if I had any recommendations. Consequently, I've decided to make it the subject of this week's Advisor.

I've been talking with a couple of clients about outsourcing and what should remain when other elements are outsourced. I've also been reading about the same topics.

At its simplest level, every project can be broken down into three components: schedule, scope, and resources. In other words, who's doing what and when. Resources map into who, scope maps into what, and schedule maps into when.

Although commonly accepted by many organizations as just an additional route to market, e-business builds heavily on an enterprise's technical infrastructure, directly affects PR and marketing strategies, and is subject to a number of cultural, legislative, and environmental constraints.

The past few years have been slow for most of us. Companies have been focusing on saving money rather than on expanding or looking for new opportunities for growth. Most hardware and software vendors have been sitting and waiting for the economy to shift gears and start to grow again.

One of the most interesting acquisitions announced in recent months in the BI market is that Geac is acquiring financial analytics applications vendor Comshare, Inc. for approximately US $52 million.

Many companies concentrate their management efforts on executing individual projects but fail to give the same attention to the project portfolio itself. The result is suboptimal performance and returns for the portfolio as a whole. Project portfolio management (PPM) attempts to rectify this situation by ensuring that: