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'IT Doesn't Matter' - Yeah, Right
Contributed by James Maguire osOpinion.com June 05, 2003 http://www.osopinion.com/perl/story/21672.html "IT Doesn't Matter," an article originally published in the Harvard Business Review, has become a major source of debate in the tech industry. It has been quoted repeatedly in a raft of publications and media broadcasts, and e-mailed back and forth by a frenzied crowd of tech-industry watchers. What may be most surprising is that a column that takes a short-sighted view of the future of IT has By comparing IT with the great generated so much buzz. What makes the piece so industries of yesteryear, like the objectionable, though, is that the author's emphasis railroads and electricity, HBR editor-aton trimming budgets rather than creating large Nicholas Carr misses the point opportunities will likely be welcomed enthusiastically that IT is still in its infancy. by IT executives still stuck in the "cut at all costs" mode. In short, the fallout from the article is exactly what IT does not need at this point. In making his points, Carr misses the importance of future IT developments that will impact not just the tech industry but, well, the world.
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The Gist of It
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In summary, the article by HBR editor-at-large Nicholas Carr states that IT has become nothing more than a necessary cost -- a commodity. "IT is the latest in a series of broadly adopted technologies -- think of the railroad or the electric generator -- that have reshaped industry over the past two centuries," Carr writes. "For a brief time, these technologies created powerful opportunities for forward-looking companies. But as their availability increased and their costs decreased, they became commodity inputs. From a strategic standpoint, they no longer mattered. That's exactly what's happening to IT, and the implications are profound," he states. In the face of IT's decline, Carr says that companies' focus should be "on reducing risks, not increasing opportunities." He concludes that companies need to manage IT costs more aggressively. "IT may not help you gain a strategic advantage, but it could easily put you at a cost disadvantage," he maintains.
Missing the Point
The core weakness in Carr's argument is that his understanding of IT's history is shortsighted. By comparing it with the great industries of yesteryear, like the railroads and electricity, he misses the point that IT is still in its infancy. One of the great drivers of the IT revolution -- the Web -- has been widely adopted for only a handful of years and is used by just a small fraction of the world's population. We haven't yet finished the first boom-and-bust cycle. Saying as something nascent and everchanging as IT has reached a railroad-like industrial maturity is like saying Oklahoma was fully settled 20 minutes after the territory's 1889 opening.
Hardware and Software
To complicate the picture, some signs seem to back up Carr's view. The computing power of the mainframe, that big specialized beast, is being challenged by processor chips made by Intel, AMD and others. These processors have turned computing power -- IT's basic building block -- from a highly expensive rarity to a relatively inexpensive commodity. Like electricity, computing hardware has gotten cheap and widely available. But hardware is only part of IT. As the Intel processors replace the mainframe dinosaur, the new open-source software model is emerging to challenge the proprietary-software
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business. Nobody knows what this titanic struggle will bring -- not even open source's supporters can fully predict it. But the turmoil created by open source is indicative of an industry in its Wild West phase, not a fully commoditized industrial grandpop like electricity.
Big Wave Coming
Adding to the portrait of IT as youthful -- offering more opportunities than reasons for belt tightening -- is the emerging field of Web services. An area so new the average person outside of IT has no idea it exists, Web services is a constantly changing set of standards described with an alphabet soup of acronyms. As much as anything in IT, Web services' promise of streamlined business processes will offer a strategic edge to those who can harness it more efficiently than their competitors. The big guns are spending heavily on this new whiz-bang technology. The large companies that avoid this area of technology because they view IT as something to be merely cost-managed will miss out on one of business's biggest waves.
Train Leaving the Station
Carr's article might be dismis...