Opinion

Brian Arthur: Security and the Information Revolution

In August, CSO's sister publication, CIO, held a conference in Colorado Springs. One of the speakers was Stanford University economist Brian Arthur, who spent an exceptionally lucid hour debunking management guru Peter Drucker's assertion that the information revolution has come to an end.

By Lew McCreary

October 07, 2002 — CSO — In August, CSO's sister publication, CIO, held a conference in Colorado Springs. One of the speakers was Stanford University economist Brian Arthur, who spent an exceptionally lucid hour debunking management guru Peter Drucker's assertion that the information revolution has come to an end. Arthur buttressed his bullish argument with examples, from industrial history, of other large-scale transformations that stalled and languished after celebrated early stages. In each case, the becalmed revolution eventually got its second wind, fulfilling the vision of its early potential. (Arthur spoke at length about the railroading craze in England in the middle 1800s, which boasted an irrationally exuberant stock-valuation bubble not unlike our own recent dotcom one.)

In making his comparisons, Arthur provided a plausible context in which to understand the present technology market doldrums. Information technology, he said, now finds itself in a state of development comparable to that of the automobile in the early 1900s, when it lacked adequate brakes, windshield wipers, headlights, an internal ignition system andmost importantan interlaced network of paved roads and a critical mass of gas stations and other amenities. Arthur calls those supporting systems "arrangement of use" technologies. They, in short, are all of the myriad related elements that make a technology safe and comfortable to adopt for the broadest population of users. In the case of the automobile, it would take until the 1950s, many decades after its invention, before that "arrangement of use" infrastructure was fully in place.

"Until we stop noticing technology," said Arthur, "we will not have achieved that goal."

One thing worth noticing about much of today's technology is its intrinsic lack of security. Two of this month's storiesDaintry Duffy's "How to Rope In Rowdy Technologies" (Page 44) and Scott Berinato's "The Big Fix" (Page 30)take different angles on this fundamental problem: Berinato looks at security-driven efforts to improve software quality and Duffy looks at a quartet of bedeviling infrastructural hot spots. Only when the inherent vulnerability of our flawed technology architectures is addressed successfully will the "arrangements of use" for the information revolution be complete.

While in Texas in August to promote our new magazine, I met with David Pulaski, CEO of a startup company called IM-Age Software. The bit before the hyphen stands for instant messaging, which happens to be one of the technologies least beloved by CSOs (see Duffy's story). Pulaski talked evangelistically about his solution, which entails the end-to-end encryption of instant messages. Finally it dawned on me that Pulaski is interested in taming the unsavory aspects of IM not because he wants to make your lives easier. He's doing it so that the enterprise market for IM will grow much bigger, much faster. He's an IM vendor, not a security vendor. Secure IM is Pulaski's Trojan horse for accelerating acceptance of IM by the CSOs and CIOs who will otherwise cool eager users' jets unless the security issues get fixed. Clearly, Pulaski has recognized the truth of Arthur's basic point: Revolutions can't live on revolutionaries alone. After a technology is invented, it must then be civilized.

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