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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."
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.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
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.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
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.
.Net when all the business needs is email and word processing, I still think W2K is sufficient.
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
Murray Todd Williams
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...
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
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.
A Good Intro to NetBS
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.