Will eco-fear stifle innovation?

Knee-jerk IT choices made in the face of imaginary meltdowns could stymie technological innovation.

At US investment bank Morgan Stanley, the IT department conducts dress rehearsals of how it would respond to natural disasters, terrorism and hacker attacks.

We must, it seems, practice for tomorrow’s disaster scenarios today. And this is not just an American trend. In the City of London, 60 institutions have pored over a series of Friday letters from the Financial Services Authority outlining how an imaginary mass outbreak of avian flu has hit the UK’s staffing levels, and demanding to learn – by Monday – what each institution intends to do about business continuity.

Actually, British thinking about the future is even more apprehensive than American. Take the new Stern Report on the economics of climate change. There we first move forward, despite massive “uncertainties”, into “catastrophe”. We then learn that future generations will be even more strongly affected than current ones, “yet they lack representation in present-day decisions”. The result is that, in order to avoid youth hating us all when we are in our graves, we must at once tax and trade carbon, and change our behaviour.

IT chiefs, however, should avoid “backcasting” the worst case scenarios of the future so as to justify impulsive actions in the present. This fad revolves around our fears; it has little to say about how to develop major technological innovations. If, after all, someone had said back in the 1960s that mass gambling, gaming and pornography would be among the main outcomes of the internet in 2006, it might never have been developed. And an appeal to the sensibilities of generations as yet unborn would have reinforced that negative development.

Harvard professor Andrew McAfee divides IT into three categories. “Functional” IT, McAfee says, is for standalone tasks: it’s about word processing, or spreadsheets. By contrast, “network” IT – employee blogs, company wikis and mash-ups – are optional, bottom-up, collaborative tools for the expression of peer judgments and for garnering high-level patterns out of low-level interactions. Lastly, “enterprise” IT is about top-down, mandatory means for redesigning business processes, standardising workflows and – inevitably – monitoring developments. In an implicit dig at IT sceptic Nicholas Carr, McAfee concludes that though the resources bound up in these “three worlds of IT” may not be scarce, “a successfully implemented system isn’t easy to replicate”.

That’s right. Having the confidence to see through major innovations is what future generations will remember us for. We will not be remembered for our fire drills.