Five Experts on What IT Executives Should Do After 9/11
Sun, September 01, 2002
CIO — Last fall in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, we asked experts what CIOs should do in critical areas. We recently contacted them to see how their views have changed.
John McCarthy, executive director of the critical infrastructure protection prt, George Mason University Law School, Arlington, Va.
Last year, McCarthy said that after 9/11 corporate leaders needed to think about people as well as computer systems when planning for disaster recovery.
NOW, McCarthy says the people side of risk management is more important now than it was last year, but since Sept. 11 most companies have still focused on using technology in preparing response to physical threats or cyberattacks. "Yet very few people in either the government or the private sector are discussing security for that technology," he says. "And that makes your organization and your people more vulnerable." CIOs, he says, must act as a champion for security when leaders discuss risk management. "They are the lead technology change agent and the first line of defense," he says.
Joseph Badaracco, professor focusing on leadership and ethics, Harvard Business School, Boston
Last year, Badaracco stressed that managers needed to get back to work but also keep lines of communication open. "Managers have got to find a way to give people space and let them work through this."
Now, Badaracco says organizations have returned to an uneasy normality, and managers are once again dealing with basic business issues. "People can’t forget, but routines and day-by-day stuff are taking up most of people’s minds now. But I don’t think it would take much to disturb this uneasy normality. If something else happens, organizations and managers will have to react to the renewed feelings from the original event."
David Dobrin, president, B2B Analysts, Cambridge, Mass.
Last year, Dobrin said global business would need to depend on IT more than in the past. "CIOs need to provide the business with the capability to be more responsive, to get advanced warnings from customers, to look at point-of-sale data from retailers and feed that back to manufacturing," he said. He also predicted that business travel would grind to a near halt. "The cost of business travel will now be spent on IT," he said.
Now, Dobrin says he is surprised by how quickly business travel came back. "Yes, videoconferencing did get a boost but not a terribly big one," he says. But even more important is a subtle shift in attitudes since 9/11 that has affected IT projects.
