Trace | 
04 4th, 2008| 
Does Information Technology affect the stock price? If zero help desk issues were to occur would the stock price of your company go up? If you have a catastrophic system failure event in your infrastructure would the stock price go down?
Obviously if your company is involved in e-commerce or some other high-tech public facing business then publicly visible downtime affects your ability to make money for the duration of the outage. I fully believe that your stock price is affected by the technology that provides your money making ability. Your company likely has many polices and systems in place to minimize, if not remove, the risk of downtime all together. In this example I think it is safe to say that without a doubt e-commerce or your technology that is public facing affects your stock price.
What about the other companies? Lets look at an oil exploration company for instance. They likely only have a generic website. No other public facing technology. Lets say they have a major system outage for email. No email in the whole company for 24 hours. Do you think their stock price will be affected? How much will it be affected? If it was affected, lets say 0.1%, will it recover after email is working again?
What about email viruses and spam? Does the time lost to employees finding good email in the pile of spam amount to anything on the stock market? How about an executive not having a computer that works for a day or two? How about if an executives phone fails to function for a day? And if his mobile phone fails? What if any of it was down for a week?
What if the company never had the technology? Are they not able to realize their full earning potential? I have vendors trying to sell me on technology all of the time based on how much more efficient my company could be. If we are are more efficient then wouldn’t we be less efficient when the technology fails? Does more efficient mean higher stock prices? Does technology provide efficiency or convenience?
I would love to think that all of the hard work that I put into my companies infrastructure systems somehow makes for a better stock price. In the end I think it all comes down to what your company does. It also depends on when that system outage occurs. So where do you invest in redundancy and fault tolerance? In your convenience’s or your efficiency? Who makes the decisions on what is redundant and what is not at your company? If you made the decisions yourself did you do so with any input from your executive management?
More and more as technology is evolving in the workplace I have found the number one system is E-Mail. As unified communications becomes more popular I think we will find that communications in general is the single most important system for most companies. Ask around and let me know what is important at your company!
