Insights into Wall Street and tips for IT and business managers looking to understand the financial sector and how to solve budget problems posed by a stock market dip.

From lost productivity from fantasy football to the SAP skills shortage to IT alignment and spending, the results from these sometimes scary or silly (and nearly always self-serving) studies may surprise you.

From hidden costs of new devices entering the network and new network end points being developed to increased connectivity and physical expansion needs, these tips, including virtualization, consolidation and measuring bandwidth consumption, will help you reduce costs as network management becomes more complex and expensive.

Companies look to business analysts to facilitate IT-business communication and help determine technology strategies that will drive greater revenue.

When it comes to cutting costs, tech managers should seize the opportunity to refocus their IT departments in a way that makes the business more competitive, reduces the impact of IT budget cuts, drives performance improvement and enhances the overall value of IT. Surprisingly, there are seven opportunities to achieve these goals that IT often overlooks.

The IT budget is not immune to economic conditions. A survey by Gartner indicates what's happening with IT budgets and what you need to do for the 2009 fiscal year--like consolidate your gains, raise the visibility of IT value and use those results to set expectations.

In the first of a three-part series, CIOs frustrated by project management pitfalls in Agile methodologies and techniques like Scrum will learn to plug leaks of time and costs that threaten deliverables.

Marks & Spencer reduced like-for-like IT running costs by 13.5 percent last year, shareholders were told at the companys annual general meeting this week.

Quality, teamwork, leadership, and accepting risks are some of the key factors that support innovation, suggests Neil Armstrong.

Tips for effectively managing IT in a MAD world, from staff support and business expectations to juggling priorities. Involving IT early can help organizations achieve business objectives by implementing the processes and programs that help position IT departments and companies for long-term agility and competitive advantage.