Britain's had a bad year in information technology. In March, London's Stock Exchange abandoned its partially completed Taurus system to administer share-trading, despite having already spent well over $500 million on it.
Traditionally, British managers have shared James Bond's attitude toward technology - a potentially wonderful but dispensable luxury. Real men don't need to think too hard about widgets (technology too complicated to take seriously). If the boffin's (person who take widgets seriously) laser-guided wristwatch doesn't get the baddies, a swift karate kick will always suffice.
No longer. Taurus's collapse threatens the future of the London Stock Market - now Europe's biggest trading center but increasingly under threat from younger, hungrier, and better automated markets in Paris and Frankfurt.
Taurus was supposed to automate the administrative work of transferring ownership of shares from buyer to seller. In London that task takes up to two weeks, elsewhere it takes only a few electronic seconds. But instead of sitting down to build a workable system, the bureaucrats let their imaginations run away with their common sense. With each year that passed, the proposed system became ever more ambitious, and ever more impractical.
In March the head of the Stock Exchange called a halt to the project. A committee was appointed to see what could be salvaged from the mess. But already other financial centers have begun trying to tempt traders away from London. An investor sitting at his desk in London can trade almost as easily in Frankfurt or New York as he can in his own town. While Britain was dreaming, the rest of the world was building. The question now is whether the British can manage to wake up, and take technology seriously, before it's too late.
ELECTRIC WORD
Net Living: The East Coast Hang Out
Tech Troubles Threaten London Stock Market
Everything But the Broken Bones
