A full explanation of the nature and causes of the wild stock market plummet earlier this month is yet to be uncovered, but it's clear that information technology played a role. Some notable IT experts see signs of more than just a system hiccup--signs of what is to come if we don't rethink how technology is developed, deployed and used in critical systems like Wall Street's.      

Eric Lundquist at eWeek sets forth five reasons he believes the plunge May 6 wasn't just a one-time glitch. Wall Street's IT system is maximized for making money, not for monitoring trades, and there is no over-arching infrastructure that raises red flags for regulators in time to act on wild developments, he writes. What's more, the system is so complicated that we may never get a decisive explanation of what happened.

"Sometimes a technology/business mashup just means you don't really know what is going on in the financial marketplace," Lundquist writes. "No one likes to admit that."

Sadly, it won't be too long before another major error on Wall Street will cause turmoil, Lundquist predicts: "I don't know what it will be, but it will be fast and include technology driven by some traders betting on a new scam, and lots of pundits will spend lots of keystrokes trying to figure out what happened."

Ed Sperling at Forbes suggests that Wall Street's swan dive on May 6 could be a sign of some fundamental problems in software development. As a greater number of functions are included in software programs and these programs are integrated with others, the number of errors that are introduced in the systems is growing, he writes. At one time, hardware controlled some of these functions, but the emphasis increasingly is on software because it is easier to modify and vendors can release it faster. 

"The emphasis [on software] is on passable, not perfect, because software has many more things that can go wrong than hardware," Sperling writes. "Think of the number of permutations in millions of lines of code and billions of ones and zeros. It's impossible to test them all and still get a software application or operating system out the door on schedule--possibly even within our lifetimes."

All software contains bugs, and some bugs have more serious consequences than others. Many of the difficulties companies run into stem from not just one buggy application but from several applications that have been integrated, he writes.  It remains to be seen whether the stock market plunge was just an isolated mistake or a harbinger of software-induced problems to come.

For more:
- see Eric Lundquist's column at eWeek
- see Ed Sperling's column at Forbes

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