IT must keep its head in a crisis

The scale and ease of transmission of Sars have been exaggerated by the media, with the result that stock market analysts have marked down growth prospects for tourism, airlines, Thailand and even Japan. Yet if Sars is a relatively minor affair, the reaction to it nevertheless has important implications for the world of IT.

In Hong Kong, schools have put classes and homework materials on to the web so that pupils can study at home. Edinburgh’s Interactive University, a £2.3m non-profit company backed by Scottish Enterprise, has also helped Chinese authorities work around Sars, by giving 30,000 students e-learning materials from Scottish higher education.

On 12 May, Taiwan imported 2,000 sets of teleconferencing kit to monitor the homes of people held in quarantine. What is evident from such developments is that Sars has dramatically boosted the use of IT for crisis management.

The web, telecoms, e-learning and remote diagnostics in medicine are all going to be pressed into a new kind of service: the tactics of evasion.

I say evasion because, attractive as it might seem, portraying IT as a means of assuring business continuity limits the contribution that it can make to the world. Extending IT to tens of thousands of Chinese students – while a commendably generous move on the part of the Interactive University – is merely taking an IT sledgehammer to crack a medical nut.

Nobody is saying that Sars is a nice thing to catch. But it is worth remembering that only about 250 mainland Chinese have died of it – far fewer than die every day of other diseases in China.

The problem with prostrating IT before the idol of business continuity is that the whole exercise is founded on a health panic. People take at face value the global, immediate and ubiquitous risk that Sars is meant to represent and gleefully proceed to build IT “solutions” around worst-case scenarios.

In fact, IT could do much more to help general medicine in China and elsewhere than it can as an oh-so-agile defence mechanism against disaster.

In fact, in an indirect way, chip manufacturing technology has already helped the battle against Sars. Affymetrix, a Californian biotechnology firm, has put the sequence of 30,000 chemical letters that make up the virus onto a “gene chip” – a small silicon-glass wafer. That will speed up epidemiology and diagnosis, in part by helping scientists classify different strains of Sars in terms of their virulence.

Sars will not be the last health panic. That is why IT professionals must take it seriously – and why they must put the disease itself in perspective.

IT has a bigger role to play in innovation, including medical innovation, than the disaster mentality allows.