I certainly hope we don't see many more articles in this vein coming out, which suggest that Information Technology may bear some of the blame for the current market crisis. The post, by the usually completely level-headed John Halamka, CIO and Dean for Technology at Harvard Medical School, reads more like a jealous and petty gotcha for financial services IT departments. "Since 1998, I've often been told that Healthcare IT needs to take a lesson from the financial folks about doing IT right," Halamka says, before going on smugly to speculate that perhaps Healthcare IT isn't so backward and maybe financial services IT isn't such hot stuff after all. "One thing is for certain, In 2008, no one is going to tell me that healthcare IT should run as well as Lehman Brothers," he promises near the end.

While it will likely be years, if not decades, before we know all the factors leading into the current crisis, it seems sophmoric to focus on IT as the culprit at this point. Halamka's questions as to the business intelligence capabilities and dashboard tools available to executives are unlikely to provide definitive clues, simply due to the complexity of the financial instruments and the relative difficulty of judging the efficacy of presentations in such diverse environments. But those questions seem beside the point when plenty of people inside and outside the industry were warning of the potential for such a collapse for going on a year now. Clearly sufficient information was available, and decipherable to some; how much responsibility can you place on a BI dashboard to make the user get the point?

It sounds as if Halamka is bitter about the characterization of healthcare IT as a red-headed stepchild in the industry, and financial services IT as the fair-haired boy. But these were characterizations not without reason; until recently, healthcare IT has lagged considerably behind the potential of IT as a whole, while financial services has been at the forefront. Financial services IT had largely automated its whole world at a time when healthcare IT was struggling to get the most basic patient data consistent inside an organization (to say nothing of across the industry). This is simply how it was; there's no need to feel defensive about it, particularly considering the strides that healthcare IT has made, many of them courtesy of forward-thinking CIOs like Halamka. But accusing IT of having a significant hand in this meltdown reflects as poorly to the general public on healthcare systems as it does on financial systems. They (and many executives) don't see the differentiation. Computers are computers, and if you're telling them those devilish machines just blew up their 401K, do you think they're going to trust them with their medical information or to run the antivirus software effectively??

Let's slow down and not shoot ourselves all in the foot just yet by stirring up idle speculation over the culpability of technology in the current meltdown. Perhaps a larger discussion is in order over the velocity of markets in an age of automated trading systems, and how removing people from the loop in either financial services, or healthcare, may be a bad idea, but I think any finger-pointing at this point does us all more harm than good.