BIS Review 3/2000  2  Because the future is never entirely predictable, risk in any business action committed to the future that is, virtually all business actions - can be reduced but never eliminated. Information technologies, by improving our real-time understanding of production processes and of the vagaries of consumer demand, are reducing the degree of uncertainty and, hence, risk.
In short, information technology raises output per hour in the total economy principally by reducing hours worked on activities needed to guard productive processes against the unknown and the unanticipated. Narrowing the uncertainties reduces the number of hours required to maintain any given level of production readiness.