Does IT Matter?

geoff313 asks: "I'm sure many of you are aware of the uproar over Nicholas Carr's article 'IT Doesn't Matter' which was published in the Harvard Business Review, back in May. While many big names in the IT world have responded already to Carr's article (Ballmer has declared it 'Hogwash' and Fiorina has pronounced it 'Dead Wrong'), Carr debated vendor executives Monday at the Comdex trade show, proving that the issues he raised are still resonaating through the industry. Do you feel that corporate IT budgets should be focusing on cutting edge technology to best serve its customer's needs, or should they focus on shoring up what they have now in order to maximize its usefulness to the customer? Some background can be found from the Washington Post, InfoWorld, and ZDNet, as well as at Nicholas Carr's site."

"For those of you unfamiliar his philosophy, it can be summed up pretty thoroughly by his statement 'Follow, don't lead,' arguing that the huge advances in the IT industry over the last two decades have erased the strategic advantage to be had by corporations for staying at the cutting edge of technology. In short, he advises 'executives need to shift their attention from IT opportunities to IT risks - from offense to defense.' Of course the head honchos at IBM and Microsoft disagreed with him, citing Wal-Mart's use of RFID tags to keep track of inventory and other forward thinking IT decisions as a refutation of his thesis.

What I am interested in is the opinion of those in trenches of the IT war."

many big names in the IT world?

[tarquin_fim_bim]

Sounds like sound bytes for neophytes, commerce drives the IT pony, always has been, always will be. Perhaps to the chagrin of Messers Bulmer & co, who'd like to think that they drive the 'supply & demand' pony.

Does it matter yes

[cluge]

The IT budget has to be looked at the same exact way as any other departmental budget. What does your company get for the money invested. If your ebay - the money may be well spent in IT. If your bricks and mortar inc you may wish to invest in other areas. It all depends. Only an analytical ruthless, pencil to paper approach will tell you that.

Unfortunately too many executives - scared at their own ineptness when it comes to IT think that a big IT budget and a smart (insert favoritte IT stereotype here) is going to make them a million bucks. Feast your eyes on the dot bomb waste land ladies and gentlemen.

In the end it is the talent of the people that make it work that will be the deciding factor - as long as they were hired after a very careful and down to earth review of what was needed. There is no substitute for hard work, and good analysis.

Employee Retention...

[curunir]

Will employees really want to work for a company that doesn't stay current with technology? I know I would be worried if I felt like my skillset was aging and I would be a less attractive hire to new employers.

I've met a lot of people who got into this industry because they enjoyed the "playful" nature of their work. Without the latest "toys" to play with, many IT workers won't enjoy their work.

Intelligent growth and application.

[MurrayTodd]

I worked a few years in the IT of a "Fortune 50" drug company. I cannot begin to tell you how many hundreds of thousands of dollars were thrown around for silly and stupid reasons, mostly so Pointy Haired Bosses could play "buzzword bingo" in order to sound important and get promotions.

I on the other hand worked in the trenches and off everyone's radar. I set up a Linux server (I could arguably claim to be the beginning of the Linux movement at this place.) and as I learned about a new interesting technology--mostly database and web stuff--I would ponder whether I could build something that would make IT's job easier. Over three major projects I could estimate having saved at least half a million dollars in labor by leveraging "new technology" to improve operations.

Now back to the question: what do we mean when we talk about being "offensive or defensive"? If offensive/proactive means implementing a new technology because the buzzword is hot, piss off and stop wasting money. If it means keeping a few bright people on the cutting edge, investigating whether new technologies can improve overall corporate efficientcy, then by all means YES.

If it means investing zillions of dollars for the eventual Longhorn update and all the new applications that are upgraded to .Net when all the business needs is email and word processing, I still think W2K is sufficient.

Re:RFID tags

[theMerovingian]

RFID might work at UPS. I used to load trucks there while in school.

Every box gets scanned coming into circulation, entering the warehouse, being loaded into feeder trucks, coming out of feeder (semi) trucks, going into delivery trucks, and then when delivered by the brown-shorts.

Every time the boxes get scanned (at each event listed above), it is by some sucker in the Teamster's union. Think Jimmy Hoffa. These guys make upwards of $9.50/hr, and get health/dental insurance.

UPS will develop their RFID tech in secret, and wait for another Teamster's Union strike...

Re:RFID tags

[Cramer]

Odd, I've never seen a robot drop, mis-feed, or jam a tape. And they cost far less, and work far more hours than a high-school kid.

UPC codes take some work to scan. A smudge or bend makes it hard to read. And for self-checkout, it's much easier for people to put something through a hoop than it is to get them to find and align the UPC code for scanning. Don't laugh... I've seen people too dumb to scan their own items. (Personally, I'm too fast for the self-scanner. Gimme the real register.)

Plenty of opportunity still yet

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I thoroughly disagree with Carr. There is still PLENTY of opportunity for IT to lead, just look at Homeland Security and TIA. IT has just barely begun to bring us the Big Brother that Orwell promised us. Any smart organization, commercial or public, should be pushing the limits of what IT can do today to bring on the oppressive survelliance society!

Shoring up the walls

[snowlick]

Carr is right about the ubiquity of IT. Everyone has it, so by and large it's not really a selling point by itself. He's also right that it's really important to shift focus from buying into new ideas to making sure the old ones work.

However, a critical component of the advancement of IT is the "new idea"(surprise). Computer science is still expanding and changing from day to day. As we all know, most ideas are way ahead of their time as far as computing power goes. We always seem to be playing catch-up with our theories. Components get faster and cheaper, and we're continually discovering new and better ways to utilize them to do what we need to do. Take the current boom in wireless technologies as an example. It will change the way a lot of companies do business. To survive and moreover to compete these companies must be able to adapt to new technologies. Of course not all businesses will have to ride that bleeding edge but the effects will trickle down.

The bar is still being raised. I can see a leveling off happening in the future, but as the price of hardware continues to drop we can be sure that IT will still be relevant as newly affordable/feasible ideas come to light.

Noise. Harvard style.

[OldCrasher]

Years ago NME opined of the band "Wild Horses," While we have Electricity we will have Bands like this! Today we have the Harvard Business School, and while it exists we will have err, gentlemen, like Carr.

IT does matter. It will continue to matter till such time some far more advanced concept sweeps it aside, just as the computer finally nudged Caxton's Press to one side in the last decade.

The example of using RFID tags at Walmart is actually proving the point that IT does matter. Walmart is one of the most truly, colossally computer intensive companies on the planet. Just ask KMart if Walmarts' IT efforts were worthless and a waste of time.

Without IT as we know it today, companies like GE could not exist. They would collapse under their own weight in paper. They require bleeding edge technology just to manage Terabytes of data, forget about actually doing anything to sift those terabytes and make sense of them. Without Information Technology much of the US economy would not exist. IT matters, it pulled us out of the morass of the 70's, the height of the lack-of-information-technology era.

Carr seems to fail in all points, because he is the quintessential academic. He has no concept of what is at the heart of real business, or that real businesses very heart is now a computer.

IT a commodity? Only if peoples brains are such.

Re:View from a government agency

[IM6100]

Wait until people discover the new 'terminals' are tempremental flaky substitutes for those 'green screens' that you could turn on, like a shredder, the telephone, or an electric stapler and just use, for years at a time, with only routine maintenance.

IT veteran

[Usquebaugh]

I've worked in the trenches for almost 20yrs. I have to say he hit the nail on the head.

Why should a business spend a shed load of money to gain no advantage? They shouldn't they should look to buy IT as a utility or infrasturture.

Why is Open Source booming? A lot of devleopers/managers realise that all they need is software that does the job, anything extra is supurflous. They'll glady help/pay to write the software as long as they only pay once.

The first business that adopts the less is more approach to software will dramatically reduce IT costs. 90% functionality is more than enough for anybody :-)

List the applications a business needs and then see if they are available. The race is on, which Open Source projects are going to be the 800lb gorilla.

My list

Low level PL C/C++
Business PL (Java/Perl/Python)
OS Linux (Debian)
Desktop (KDE,Gnome)
Web Server Apache
Browser Mozilla
Office Suite Open Office
Database SAP DB
Accounts Package (Gnu Cash)
ERP Compiere
CRM
BI

You'll notice there are no commercial products. Business will require open source in the future, why pay for upgrades when you can get it at low cost.

A closed source company will be required to defend itself with ip law. Expect to see more and more patent wars waged, rather like the pharma companies. A patent is a license to print money but when it expires so does your money. Generic Drugs=Generic software.

The question is do you want to work in IT when your only job is gluing other peoples code together? If not you'd better start thinking about which project you wish to work on.

You think vertical markets are going to help you, think again. How many forms of banking are there? How many types of insurance.. etc etc The first big OS project in these markets will probably never be over taken.

IT will only ever be a large expense to those companies that can derive profit from that expense.

IT is not about tech for tech's sake!

[scorp1us]

Technology is supposed to enable us to do more. As long as it does that, tech is a success. The hardware companies wil convince you that that means more Mhz and more disk.

In reality though, if you can put to use that PIII-700 to do something productive, then it is a success.

For an analogy consider a Cray vs a TRS-80. A Cray running a bubble sort will be beaten by a TRS-80 running QuickSort for just a few thousand elements. The same is true for tech in general. Work smart, not hard.

There are times where raw Mhz are needed, these are real-time requirements or due to lag creating some kind of penalty (if it takes 20 mins to get an answwr back, you'll be more selective in your questions, where as if it took milli-senconds, you'd take time to ask more creative questions - this was the prupoe behind Beowolf clusters)

And again, we see work smart not hard. Put those PIII-700 to work as a cluster, working smart, not hard.

Better processes are key. Brute force allows you to compensate for lack of a good process, but you pay a premium.

I see all too often PDAs being used instead of note pads. PDAs many be status simbles and nifty, but I can put notes in and read notes back off a pad of paper faster than the fastest PDA users.

But does IT matter?

[CrackedButter]

Once we define what IT is then we would have a better chance at finding out whether it matters or not. IT would be easier to put IT in its proper place of context. Until then the eternal question of whether IT matters will remain answered...

Re:Noise. Harvard style.

[nelsonal]

I think you're on to something. I think all of us could point to a successful company that owes its success to their IT implementation, Dell and Wal~Mart are both excellent examples of why IT matters. Both utilized many technologies to significantly reduce their costs and destroy their competitors. However, I doubt that on a weighted basis, K-Mart and HP (or Compaq or any of the grocery stores Wal~Mart is now beating) spent less on IT than the succesful companies did. My personal favorite is Milken, the Junk Bond king, who started by gettng buisness calculators (at the time cutting edge technology, that helped his firm price bonds faster then their competitors who relied on charts and books of charts. I'd say that implementations of IT matter a whole lot. No matter how much their competitors spent on IT they never began to approach the same level of benefits that the successful companies got from their IT. Now that would be an interesting subject for this guy to study. Too often businesses get the idea that IT spending made their competitor successful. What matters more than just IT spending is how you implement the stuff you bought. That will probably never be a commodity, and will drive business success well into the next big thing.

True, and the same in other disciplines

[RiffRafff]

As a metrologist, I am acutely aware that my job is not a "valued added" function. I work for an aerospace company that is one of the 30 companies whose stocks make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average. What I do, day in and day out, does not help sell product. What I mean is, consumers expect their avionics to meet spec. They do not expect to pay extra to have the test equipment that was used to align these devices calibrated; they take that for granted. As such, it adds no saleable quality to the end product. If aerospace companies could do without a calibration department, they would certainly do so. Luckily (from my point of view) certain agencies DO understand the importance of having measurements based on traceable national and international standards (like the FAA, and ISO). And hopefully it will help make the difference between your airliner landing on that runway in the fog, and touching down in the swamp just to the left. But still, my job function is considered "indirect" and does not help sell the product.

I see IT as being in the same same boat...companies NEED an effective IT department to stay competitive, but consumers are not willing to pay extra for it. It is a foregone conclusion by consumers that effcient companies have an effective IT infrastructure.

Like calibration, IT is not likely to be missed until the effects of its disappearance are noticed.

Re:IT...

[sowellfan]

I'm an engineer (I design air conditioning systems), and as far as the manufacturers I deal with are concerned, this article is on the money. We've got an entire wall of catalogs of assorted types of equipment, and most of them almost never get updated. Even the common brands like Carrier & Trane that have dedicated reps in our area fall behind. I tend to specify the equipment that I can get the best support for, which includes giving me access to the newest catalogs, the most updated product selection software, etc.

Trane, for example, has most of their commercial equipment catalogs with all the technical data online in PDF format for me to download, which is great. One of the catalogs was corrupted, but I couldn't figure out anywhere to *tell* anyone that there was a problem so I could get the right version of the catalog. Unfortunately, Trane has almost none of the catalogs for residential-size equipment online. If I want those catalogs, I've got to call my rep, have him go onto their internal web server and download them, and email them to me. And as I scroll down through the lists of catalogs, a third of them are in Spanish, and a bunch more are for 50 Hz power which isn't very common.

In short, they could do a lot more to keep me happy with relatively little effort. How much trouble is it to make PDFs of the new catalogs as they are printed and put them online, with Spanish stuff and 50Hz stuff separated from the mainstream stuff? Is the residential unit info so top secret that it has to be stored away on an internal service?

This isn't about cutting edge technology, it's about having the information where I can get it and use it.

The customer's needs can be accomplished many ways

[obsid1an]

Whether or not it's cutting edge is irrelevant; what matters is whether it does the necessary job. Whether it serves the customer's needs is irrelevant (to the corporation) too: there are lots of in-house needs that can be helped with good use of IT, and serving the customer's needs is certainly good business sense, but in business you do it for that reason, and not as an end in itself.

Well the problem with that statement is that it can make your company stagnant. For example, about 10 years ago the company I work at was hand drafting all of its technical drawings. That worked fine. However, they decided to spend tons of money on computers for drafting stations, and in the long run, that worked out great.

Five years later, they decided that the pen plotter that they had that took 3 minutes per D-size drawing should be upgraded to a multi-thousand dollar laser plotting machine that could make the same drawing in 10 seconds. Obviously, this type of investment was well worth it.

Lastly, just recently we moved the mechanical engineers mostly off of AutoCAD and onto Solidworks. The licenses and the much faster computers needed to run the new software cost thousands, yet we are seeing the benefits.

All of these things weren't needed, but they increased productivity. A lot of things will serve the company's or customer's needs, but some will do it faster and more efficient. That is what is meant by cutting edge.

Re:View from a government agency

[sql*kitten]

Wait until people discover the new 'terminals' are tempremental flaky substitutes for those 'green screens' that you could turn on, like a shredder, the telephone, or an electric stapler and just use, for years at a time, with only routine maintenance.

Why would they care? From the perspective of the organization the technology cost nothing, and from the point of view of the employees a crashed system means the afternoon off.

This is a government department, remember.

Huzzah for market cycles! I hope IT won't matter..

[voodoo1man]

And here's why. I think the whole reason the article was written was because "IT" never really mattered - it was crushed by snake-oil salesmen and charlatans on both sides of the fence before it ever got off the ground. Just look at what happened with the AI boom and bust of the 80s - it's almost a direct parallel of the dot com spike.

Hopefully, Presidents and CEOs everywhere will take this article seriously, stop buying shit from Microsoft, Oracle, etc. and lay off as many "IT" middle managers and system babysitters as they can (friendly casualties will be inevitable, but they always are!). The throngs of chair-warmers streaming to university CS faculties will finally stop (because it sure as hell hasn't slowed down enough!)! While companies everywhere are starting to put real solutions to work and getting back the levels of database stability and utility others have enjoyed since the 70s, real CS research will resume at universities (hopefully the Homeland Security Department will channel some of it's money into this and not into the pockets of private "IT" solutions firms), and Free Software will become the dominant licensing paradigm. Because suddenly you can't milk money out of them anymore, people will abandon languages and tools that were hot in the 70s, and the state of the art of the 80s will be reborn and flourish. Hell, maybe even AI will resurface (it sure seems to be now with the natural-language search problems getting so much attention).

This is when the real productivity gains start. Businesses adopting these technologies will once again possess competitive advantage over those that don't. As more and more people start using it, overzealous reporters start hyping it, and all sorts of carpetbaggers leech on. The bubble inflates under their hot wind, and subsequently bursts. Most everybody realizes this was all a scam, someone or another finally gets the idea that "technology doesn't matter," everyone who was doing the real work is out of a job, and the unchangeable circle of market life goes on spinning!

Re:Does IT Matter?

[michael_cain]

Let's consider each of these in a business context, which is the article's setting.

Send e-mail and instantly communicate with IM services

No question that this is useful, although I have to admit that there are some downsides to having senior management with e-mail at their disposal -- since they can send a message "instantly", they expect an answer "instantly", even when that answer requires some days of effort to obtain. But to the article's point, you DON'T need the latest and greatest hardware to do this; most messages are text-only, and many that are not text-only should be.

Pay bills and manage finances online

Again in a business context: complete expense vouchers, purchase orders, obtain current totals for department running expenses, etc. One of the largest impediments to this is the insistance on paper trails for audit purposes. The IRS, for example, requires that original receipts be available for audits. An online system must operate in parallel with the paper system. In my experience, some places have done it well and some have not. Up-to-date expense tracking would be wonderful, but is seldom delivered. Again, doing equivalent or improved paper processes should not require more computer power than is already available.

Get lot of information about anything you can think of within seconds.

For most businesses, getting the information you want about the current state of the operation would be a godsend. As many, many articles point out, though, much of the problem is that the information is already in computers, but not in a coherent fashion. At one point, it was trendy to work on corporate-wide data models; don't know if that is still the case or not. One of the biggest problems is a method for asking the question in a coherent and usable fashion. It's one things to type "tallest buildings in the world" into Google and peruse the results. It's quite another to do the equivalent of "Show me the sales results for the last three quarters for the regions with the worst performance" and get a good answer. Especially when the data is not sitting on hosts that are as friendly about scanning and indexing as the WWW.

Manage every aspect of your life ( jobs, health, you name it) with the help of technology

Let me pick one of these -- health care. Everybody has too many forms to fill out with regard to company-provided health insurance. Signing up for the health plan of your choice. Claims forms in many cases. As I mentioned above, in many cases there are requirements for a paper trail for audit purposes. Also as mentioned repeatedly, the answers to this do not require any more computing power than is currently available.

Yes, IT matters in the sense of making most aspects of the business run better. But for many of the improvements that could give large benefits immediately, you don't need to spend more money on desktop and LAN hardware.