I spent last week in the UK, mostly in a hotel, doing some consultancy and meeting up with one or two old friends. In the course of it I ran across some facts that I found interesting. Here they are:

• The diagnosis, treatment and care for cancer patients accounts for 2% of the world’s economy. In the advanced economies the figure tends to be higher, accounting for about 30% of the health sector. You could talk in terms of there being a cancer industry – because there is.
• A high proportion of prisoners in the UK are illiterate. There’s a high correlation of illiteracy and criminality. Correlation of criminality and having had a single parent or having been raised in care is also high.

So now, let’s tie these two disparate facts together. Prevention is better than cure. Few people would dispute that. The prevention of cancer would significantly reduce the costs, because many cancers are less serious and hence less expensive if caught earlier. Prostate cancer is famously so. Reduce illiteracy and unwanted children and you’ll reduce the level of crime. In fact the most effective crime reducing legislation introduced in the past 40 years was the legalization of abortion (read Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner for details of this in the US). Such legislation, of course, never had that as a target—it was an unexpected side-effect.

Now you would think that, given the seriousness and cost of crime and cancer, there would be a high investment in prevention—but there isn’t. And that boils down to a general lack of knowledge, which leads in turn to a general lack of political support for investment in prevention. It’s surprising, for example, that the public is happy to pay for criminals to go to prison when the individual cost of keeping them there (in the advanced economies) is more than the cost of keeping someone in a 5 star hotel.

Now lets introduce a third strand to this: the investment in IT.

There is a great deal of investment in IT and a great deal of what I have seen recently is expensive investment in trying to cure problems (such as in email management, IT security investments, system management, etc.) Much of this is necessary at the time that the investment is made but might not have been necessary if the right investment had been made earlier. And when the IT user cannot be blamed, the IT vendor usually can—because the IT user depends on the vendor to behave strategically.

Enough said. We’re done here.