Business affected by tragedy

The business world faces huge losses in the wake of the Sept. 11 tragedy, due not only to loss of employees, but also valuable information and computer data. The majority of the firms within the World Trade Center are already up and running again despite the events of the past weeks. Annual Information Technology (IT) spending alone in the World Trade Center is about $826 million. The cost to replace all computer equipment that was lost in the attack is estimated at $500 million. Costs of restoring IT and communications is guessed to be about $15.8 billion with long-term IT costs calculated to reach close to $8.1 billion.

Companies in the WTC are now working to find all information that was lost or destroyed in the attack. Most of the data that was on computers was backed up either online or at other offices, but the large amounts of information that existed only on paper were all destroyed. Sharon Tabor, an assistant professor in Boise State’s Business College, said she has been most surprised by the “large amounts of cooperation between firms. Even the companies that normally compete against each other are coming together to help their fellow businesses get on their feet again.” Tabor said the biggest problem for businesses at this time is, “the majority of the firms in the WTC had disaster recovery programs, but now they don’t have the employees that are trained to implement those programs.

There are companies that don’t have any members of their recovery program team still alive. It makes it hard to restore a company and get it running again.” Harry White, an associate dean and professor in the BSU College of Business and Economics, was more interested in how the attack has affected the average consumer. He believes that “in reality the economy was in trouble long before the attacks.” “The events of 9-11 are only partly to blame for the drop in the economy, all they did was have a compounding effect on the economic problems already in place,” he said.

White thinks that airlines and all other businesses associated with travel will be hit the hardest financially. This would include busses, trains, etc. not to mention travel agents and businesses that rely heavily on the tourism industry. “People are going to be very nervous about travelling for a while, this means costs are going to have to go up in order to increase security, but at the same time there will be a huge reduction in consumer spending.”

Ashley Gettings

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