Let happiness prevail

In the second month after 11 September, stocks of network monitoring firms, face-recognition specialists and iris-matching suppliers have enjoyed a boom. There has been much knowing talk about ‘disaster recovery’.

And following a flurry of corporate interest in video conferencing, vendors have promised that their end-to-end solutions will allow you to see eyes brimming with emotion when redundancies are announced.

Although the speculation about the changed IT landscape appears new, the drive towards security, biometrics and worst-case scenario redundancy in IT has been evident for some years.

In the early 1980s, I wrote commercial brochures for Coopers & Lybrand about the need to protect networks from terrorist attack. The fashion for risk management in IT dates from the same period. As Daniel Ben-Ami shows in his excellent book Cowardly Capitalism, it was in the 1980s that the whole discipline of risk management became established in firms, alongside finance, marketing and all the rest.

So the recognition of markets and market commentators for the new, risk-conscious IT is overdue. In fact, it betrays a vulgar sense of causality all too common these days. “Terrorist attacks mean boost for anti-terrorist bits of IT,” runs the genius.

There is something in the argument, but not much. It is like rushing into defence stocks, or gold: a useful tactic for weeks or months, not an investment strategy for the medium term. But there is another, still more misleading kind of economic determinism around. It suggests that we are witnessing a new sobriety about the creative, cultural, playful and branded aspects of management.

Any idiot can tell you that advertising is now in a slump, that funkier brainstorming areas have been put on hold, that IT purchasing will be about need-to-haves not nice-to-haves. With a recession, so the know-alls say, the frills will be dispensed with.

If only history moved in such a simple, predictable cycle. The economic determinist perspective completely leaves out of account the sociology of what it dismisses as frills. The point is that 11 September reinforces a longstanding boardroom mentality of risk and fear.

The management ‘frills’ – the spiritual side of running a business and a workforce – are going to become more important, not less important, as recessionary forces gather strength.

Of course, the mood now is to postpone expenditure regarded as lavish. But much more powerful than traditional economics is the search for a personal mission that now overwhelms people at work and play. In a more atomised, fearful world the urge to belong and to commune will grow more powerful.

Instant messaging will grow, especially on mobiles. Mobile-to-mobile video clips will be exchanged more frequently than people imagine. There will be electronic games and gaming everywhere you go.

In short, communications for the sake of it, for a kind of nervous relief, for a chance to find one’s identity, will multiply. In this wider, more catholic sense, ‘security’ IT does indeed have a prosperous future.