It is extremely unlikely we will see any IT companies following the example of financial services firms and carmakers in begging for state handouts. But it is nonetheless encouraging that Gordon Brown seems to be aware of the role technology can and must play in rescuing the economy.

The prime minister has taken to talking in depression-era terms as he continues his bid to save the world – ­ oops – ­ the banking industry.

Brown has on more than one occasion over the past month drawn parallels between last century’s investment in roads and railways and a 21st century priority for building digital infrastructure. His latest proposals highlight high-speed broadband networks and promoting jobs in technology industries.

This is all good to hear – ­ but forgive us a little cynicism while we wait for the proof. Only last year, the government as good as ruled out any state funding for next-generation broadband – ­ although there are rumours that technology minister Stephen Carter’s forthcoming Digital Britain review will look to find ways to better support private sector investment.

And just how many times have we been through government-backed initiatives to persuade young people to opt for a career in IT, with precious little success?

As Computing has pointed out repeatedly over the past year, history proves that companies which invest in IT are best positioned to survive a downturn. In what many predict will be the worst economic crisis for a generation, the same is surely true of countries.

Having the political will to promote our digital economy is undoubtedly a good thing, but we need fresh ideas and real momentum to make it happen.

So thanks, Gordon, for putting IT at the heart of your plans. Now let’s see some tangible actions to back up the politics.

As a business magazine for technology professionals, Computing has no real desire to write about terrorism. But once again, with great regret, such despicable acts have been forced onto the radar of IT decision-makers.

Over the past week, there has been much written about how the outrages perpetrated in Mumbai might affect India’s burgeoning IT sector -­ perhaps the biggest success story of one of the fastest-developing economies in the world.

It is with genuine reluctance that we add our thoughts to the debate.

Considerations such as offshore outsourcing are so entirely trivial compared with the appalling and tragic loss of life and the impact on people’s everyday lives in India. But it is inevitable that IT leaders will be faced with worried chief executives asking them whether or not the attacks will affect their offshore plans. Many of the big banks, for example ­- struggling already with the financial crisis ­- are dependent on Indian suppliers for development work that will be key to their survival in a recession.

There are parallels with the 9/11 attacks in the US and the 7/7 bombings in London. Amid all the carnage, it wasn’t long before some technology experts were raising the issues of disaster recovery and business continuity. Then, as now, a sense of perspective is the most important response.

In purely business terms, New York and Washington soon got back on their feet. London took great pride in proving that it was more resilient than its attackers hoped. Mumbai will do the same.

The worst thing that Western companies could do is review their offshore outsourcing plans. Such business relationships are more important to India now than ever. It is becoming a cliché, but we must not do anything that suggests the terrorists are winning.

Indian IT suppliers are global organisations, with offshore development centres around the world. The horror of Mumbai will not affect their ability to deliver ­ even as it clearly has a huge emotional impact on their employees.

IT leaders are right to be aware of the risks, but would be wrong to turn their back on India now.

We had hoped to resist the temptation to use the line: “This is not an IT strategy, this is an M&S IT strategy” when discussing Marks & Spencer’s IT transformation programme, but the opportunity was too good to turn down.

Nonetheless, there are plenty of valuable lessons that can be learned from M &S IT director Darrell Stein’s plan that can help other IT leaders drizzle some super-soft burnt sugar icing delicately over their whole fruit technology cake.

OK, we promise to stop now.

M&S has been going through a business turnaround for some time as it rides the rollercoaster of consumer tastes and high street decline. Much of what the retailer has been through will be similar to the challenges facing many recession-hit organisations in the coming months.

Stein’s “spend and save” plan is a great example of the importance of balancing the books when it comes to IT budgeting.

Experts such as Gartner and other analysts have extolled the virtues of redirecting cost cuts into IT innovation, but the reality has often proved harder to achieve.

At M&S, however, the firm is two years into a major IT change programme, yet at the same time operational IT costs have been reduced by 13.5 per cent in the last financial year and incremental IT spend cut by 60 per cent, with the overall cost of technology remaining flat.

Every IT leader needs to be looking for opportunities to remove unnecessary expenditure to free up funds for the sort of innovations that will be needed to remain competitive and come strongly out of the downturn.

Be honest ­- be brutal if you have to -­ but most managers know where there is slack in their operation that can be removed. Remember that one per cent cut from 10 areas is just as valuable ­ and sometimes more palatable ­ than 10 per cent taken from one project.

Computing has featured in recent months many of the technologies and techniques that can help to get through the credit crunch ­ virtualisation, outsourcing, a focus on customer-facing systems such as e-commerce, among others ­ these are all fruitful areas to investigate, and all used at M&S too.

With the economic crisis showing no signs of ending soon, the only certainty in the next 12 months will be uncertainty.

Clearly, financial services firms will be hardest hit, but the knock-on effects will be widespread.

However, past experience suggests that innovative users of IT will be best positioned to emerge the strongest from troubled times.

The constraints within which IT leaders will have to operate will test many. Capital expenditure will be tightly controlled, and considering that most major hardware purchases ­ and often large software licence deals too ­ are financed through leasing, with the cost of debt so high the options will be limited.

For small or medium-sized businesses, there will inevitably be a lot of interest in software-as-a-service, hosting, cloud computing and other online pay-as-you-go offerings that minimise or even avoid an up-front payment.

For bigger businesses, the spectre of outsourcing will loom large. There aren’t many major firms that have not outsourced at least some aspect of their IT operations already, and the potential for budget cuts and the conversion of direct costs to operational expenses gives a financial imperative that may be hard to argue against.

But there are plenty of technology options too. There is no silver bullet, no next big thing that IT leaders can turn to. But there are still plenty of current big things that offer significant potential savings ­ virtualisation, voice over IP and mobile working, to name but three of many.

Whatever route you prefer to choose, there is one action that all IT leaders need to take.

In previous downturns, there was much talk of bridging the IT-business divide to survive unscathed. Yet here we are again, and still the gap often seems as wide as ever.

There will rarely be a better opportunity for IT to work with its business counterparts to plot a route through all the current uncertainty. Let’s not waste this chance to cross that divide and close it once and for all.

It is impossible to separate the turmoil in the financial services sector from the prospects for IT professionals.

The finance industry is the biggest spender on technology, and the biggest private sector employer of IT experts, both full-time and contractors.

The personal concerns for those working for banks and other firms caught up in the crisis hitting the City and Wall Street are obvious ­- among the thousands expected to be laid off there will inevitably be IT staff affected.

But the unravelling of the financial markets threatens to have long-lasting implications.

The merger plans for Lloyds TSB and HBOS highlight IT consolidation - of systems and staff ­- as one of the key objectives. Lloyds TSB is a major user of offshore outsourcing -­ a move that is only likely to accelerate to ease the integration challenges it faces.

Even for those firms that are surviving the crisis, there will be pressure to cut budgets, and the lure of low-cost overseas resources will be hard to resist.

Lehman Brothers, meanwhile, spent $1.14bn (£624m) on IT last year ­- then last week sold two US-based datacentres to Barclays for $1.45bn.

There will be quite a bit of used kit turning up on eBay ­- or its business equivalent ­at this rate.

A look back at what happened to Sun Microsystems after the dot com crash earlier in the decade offers an example. All those failed e-commerce businesses that bought Sun servers sold them off as nearly new on the second-hand market, and the vendor’s sales plummeted.

IT suppliers that rely heavily on financial services customers will closely review their sales forecasts ­- some sort of hiccup seems inevitable.

But in difficult economic times it is important to remember ­- and to remind senior business executives -­ that the evidence of past downturns shows that those who make smart use of innovative technology will be the ones who come out strongest.

It is not an easy time for anyone in the finance sector, but IT leaders must step up and demonstrate that their teams are central to survival.

For the advocates of the NHS National Programme for IT, working on the project must feel rather like being part of an unfinished Rolf Harris painting: “Can you see what it is yet?”

Amid all the criticisms of the ambitious £12.7bn scheme, the one defence that has for so long been unavailable is real-life experience.

So it must be with great relief that Connecting for Health, the agency delivering the programme, is starting to see some live working examples of the technology in action.

Computing’s behind-the-scenes tour of Homerton hospital in London shows what a difference IT is beginning to make for the health service.

Rapid access to information at the fingertips of medical staff, improved communications and digital imaging are all contributing to better patient care.

Of course, this doesn’t take away from the many challenges that remain ­ not least the use of electronic patient records that sits at the heart of the programme and is suffering from the worst over-runs.

There will be more mistakes made. There will be further delays, and some hospitals will inevitably encounter problems as they go live on new applications.

The goal must be to get it right first time every time -­ but don’t be surprised if that is not always the case. The test will be whether the contingency measures are in place when needed.

Do not forget the scale of the challenge -­ this is the largest non-military IT project in the world.

There have been, and will continue to be, judgement calls made along the way that some will not agree with, and those critics will be vocal and undoubtedly louder than the advocates.

The final result may not even be the same as it is currently envisaged; there may well be further changes needed to ensure success, some of which will be pragmatic, some enforced.

But the vision of a technology-enabled NHS fit for the 21st century is worth the wait.

It has been a while since Computing reported on vendors making mandatory and unexpected changes to their commercial terms to the financial detriment of customers.

Searching back through our archives you would find plenty of examples ­ – Microsoft and the controversy over its Software Assurance scheme; Oracle used to be perpetually under fire for its licensing programmes; there were unexpected charges when companies outsourced non-transferable software licences; or even back in the big mainframe days when contractual small print seemed to lead to unfathomable reasons for price hikes.

More recently, there has been much debate over the impact of virtualisation on products historically priced on a per-processor basis.

But in general, these days IT suppliers are much more sensitive to such commercial criticisms, and the rise in active and vocal user groups has helped lead to a more conciliatory process of introducing new terms and conditions.

Yet software licensing, support fees and maintenance pricing remain among the biggest potential causes of fallout in the buyer-supplier relationship. Experienced IT decision-makers still roll their eyes to the heavens when the subject is broached.

For IT managers carefully scrutinising vendor invoices, now is a good time to be wary.

Although most of the biggest suppliers will be insulated from the worst of the current economic uncertainty, if the crunch starts to hurt you can bet a bean-counter somewhere in even your friendliest vendor will be looking to see where they can accrue a few extra pounds.

For any supplier under pressure, the desire to extract every penny from you will become even more acute.

In successful IT companies, when the marketing blurb talks about “partnerships”, that is usually the goal, and many are good at delivering on such a promise.

But ultimately, it remains a commercial relationship, and tough times can lead to unpleasant measures. For IT managers looking to control their own costs, be sure to keep a close eye on those invoices.

When the anonymous civil servants who drafted the Data Protection Act (DPA) in 1998 set about their work, they were smart enough to realise that the world of computers was likely to evolve considerably.

Keeping the law up to speed with the pace of technological change was always going to be a challenge, and the principles-based approach that underpins the DPA has worked well. Precedents set through case law have allowed the Act to encompass technical developments ­ although Marks & Spencer’s challenge to the Information Commissioner’s enforcement of laptop encryption represents a new test.

But even such legal foresight was unlikely to have taken into consideration the internet, cheap storage, USB drives, broadband, social networking and all the data-intensive applications upon which modern business life depends.

So it is right to heed the calls for a review of the DPA that will see it through its next decade.

But today, law enforcement is not enough to securely protect data. A new DPA needs to go hand in hand with best practice IT management.

When the DPA came into force in March 2000, the article in Computing concentrated on the specifics of the new law and the challenges it posed for IT departments.

Any similar feature now would cover the legal aspects in just a few lines. The complexity of the IT protecting people’s personal information has increased exponentially. And with it, the awareness of identity theft and the potential for misuse of our data has grown in parallel.

Self-regulation and self-discipline are now just as important as legislation.

Every employee needs to be constantly reminded to protect corporate data as if it were their own. And processes such as information lifecycle management need to sit alongside all the security procedures necessary to treat our information with the care we each wish it to be handled.

A review of the law is timely. The review of your IT management practices should be constant.