CCTV

Watchful Eye

by Mark Rowe

Imagine, if you will, writes Jeremy Williams of Watchful Eye, the train of thought of a passing Venusian as he briefly stops to recharge his transport with oxygenated sunlight on Planet earth, as he and his kind have done unnoticed for thousands of years. Assuming human form he glides into the store and picks out his favourite earth-only carbonated liquid, thinking idly what a quaint existence these people lead. Their lack of ability to adopt any new development always bemused him, but then any race that is able to describe one of its favourite past times with a four-minute video entitled ‘Robin Williams Golf’ (Google it) has to be worth revisiting.

Oddly, although only he knows why, there is no record of him having been in the shop at all. He ignores a structure on the ceiling that can only be some primitive, linear, single-angle observation device, and almost without thinking causes the disc recording from the device to cease functioning. Back on board, he briefly casts a watchful 360 degree eye through the liquid optics , then he is gone without trace.

Humans – can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em. Back in the real world the same is true of IT and the people who run it. Let’s face it, some of them are out-of-orbit too, but the real problem is not just with the empire builders who defend every last byte against invasion from all other services. The new gun-shy are the generation of pension worriers who infest every corporation, scared beyond Blair Witch that their existence is going to vaporise as the IT barbarians ride side-saddle through their domain. How can they possibly see out their days in the moderate comfort with which they have become so familiar, when the heavy hand of modern technology hovers like Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys across their sausage sandwich stained desks?

The simple fact is that they don’t like surprises, and anything less mechanical constitutes a surprise. If you really want to understand the definition of surprise, August 9, 1945 was a big surprise, especially if you happened to be the Mayor of Nagasaki. General Custer got a surprise when he discovered how many uninvited guests there were at his picnic at the Little Bighorn. These are surprises, evolution and progress are not.

Thinking ahead can save a lot of time and a lot of trouble. Embrace IT? embrace IP? Go for broke, get broke, be retired broke. In many cases it is exactly this generation of characters who could be, and should be writing the new script. Scrap the war – go SMART Tech – SMART as in Smart Machines Are the Real Thing.

Why? Why wouldn’t you? Once you’ve taken the time to learn about the latest generation cameras that are SMART tech in themselves and will continue to get smarter, you will become invincible. Your flexible and dedicated transmission systems avoid any Monday morning confrontation with those bleary-eyed, unforgiving and disinterested IT geeks, let alone the policy wonks who run them. Your almost Venusian-like platforms that can run systems on and off site, autonomously and automatically, monitored from both your office and the golf course simultaneously, free your time up for those corporate events you used to avoid. The ROI projects you now advertise on the front page of your integrated Wi-Fi, generated by your digital machines so intrinsic to your new independence, bring a new tide of interesting meetings with people you didn’t even know existed before – like the Finance Director – as he tries to get his head round the benefits derived from what he thought was dead money.

Make like the Venusian. He has the power to control, is above the everyday crunching of human confrontation, and is SMART enough to make sure that the trouble-makers don’t even know that he is there.

E-mail: [email protected]

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