The AEC industry loves to talk about mitigating risk on their projects. Owners, Architects and Contractors are all looking for ways to mitigate risk. Unfortunately all too often the risk is not being mitigated, it is simply being passed along to another party to handle. Owners pass it to the Designers and Contractors. Designers and Contractors add cost to the risk and pass much of it along the way to subs who then add more cost. All this adds up to substantially more expensive projects for the Owner and the risk has simply been rolled down the proverbial hill. When people talk about mitigating risk they should be evaluating ways to reduce it and not pass it along. Risk reduction should start at the very beginning of a project when the project is first mentioned. One of the biggest risks that owners can mitigate is information miss management. No one thinks about managing information in the early stages of a project when that first memo is written, but this is the most critical point of a project. All too often we hear from prospects that they already have so much information in file cabinets and binders they think it is too late to introduce a project management application into the mix. Hindsight is 2020. The senior VP of a large Engineering firm told me at a conference several weeks ago that we are great at generating large volumes of information in this industry but very poor at managing. Combine the ability to generate large volumes of information, with long duration projects, involving  potentially hundreds or even thousands of participants and you have a tremendous risk that could be easily mitigated from the start. Look no further than Caltrans and the Bay Bridge project for the cost of not controlling information. They had to stop the job and do concrete core samples 