In addition to being a tool for productivity improvement, the IT industry is itself continually finding innovative ways to increase capacity and improve their own productivity, and of course, those benefits are passed through to firms as well as to the public and private sectors. For example, advances in hardware and software now allow the same fiber optic cables to transmit more than sixty times the volume of data than just a few years ago. The open network infrastructure that is the centerpiece of these new ways of doing business is vulnerable in many ways. The recent Internet denial of service attacks exemplify how any one adept at computers can infiltrate a system and disrupt the exchange of information. Private information that was formerly processed only through closed networks is now sent through open networks where there is a greater likelihood that it can be inappropriately accessed or manipulated.
Commerce relies on a degree of trust between the parties in a transaction.
Extensive or consistent interference with maintaining trust will destroy participants' confidence and reduce the value of open networks as a commercial medium. Another clear emerging issue is privacy. Firms absolutely must be in a position to assure customers that sensitive information derived from a buyer-seller relationship will be protected. If not, electronic commerce will not flourish. Those of us in the financial services industry have discovered that, indeed, in the last year if we didn't know it before.