Geeks at the gate
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The evolution of technology companies often takes a surprise turn.
The remit of technology companies grows by the day. Who would have predicted that a company that made software for computing hobbyists would eventually spawn America’s third most-watched news channel? That an early PC manufacturer would go on to change the way the music industry operates? Or that two students with a novel idea about web searches would one day face criticism for complying with communist China’s censorship laws?
But the surprisingly broad influence of Microsoft, Apple and Google seems relatively self-explanatory when compared to an unusual side-line from one of the world’s oldest software companies, Computer Sciences Corporation: border control.
CSC has now opened its Border and Immigration Solutions (BIS) Centre of Excellence, to better serve governments who outsource their immigration control responsibilities.
The BIS is a far cry from the original goal of CSC’s founders, Roy Nutt and Fletcher Jones when they started the company in 1958: to provide assemblers and compilers for the few thousand computers that were then in existence.
But CSC has a track record for unusual purchases. In 2003, it acquired military contractor DynCorp, which also had border control contracts. However, DynCorp also had activities far removed from CSC’s core IT services offerings, including providing mercenaries for various battle arenas across the globe. CSC sold DynCorp in 2004.
Perhaps IT and immigration control are not such strange bed-fellows. Identity management technology, developed to ease the process of setting up user accounts, is being applied on a national scale in the UK’s proposed national identity register. Enforcing immigration controls – knowing when people enter and leave the country – is essentially an information integration problem.
It is a sign of the times when the controlling the flow of human traffic is entrusted to a company that began life selling a business-language compiler.
