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."

Comments

Just do it . . .

[bob_calder]

Maybe people should concentrate on doing what they really have to do, and do it well. If it happens to use a computer, fine. Clay tablets might work jsut as well for some applications.

IT...

[QueenOfSwords]

Is the business equivalent of Perl. It Makes Stuff Work. Worrying about IT isn't the right approach. Businesses should decide what they actually need to stay competitive.. and deploy that using only what IT infrastructure they need. IT's a means to an end. It DOES matter, but it's wrong to view it as an end in itself (and hence, an 'issue').

The answer is both, duh.

[drinkypoo]

When the question is whether to boldly lead, or cleverly follow, the answer is always both. You lead where you can, where you have opportunities to, because your IT department taking some initiative in expansion means that you can grow the business above it. You have resources, products, and customers, and IT sits in between all three of them to some degree, and makes them possible, just as your maintenance department does. After all it's kind of hard to have meetings if the lights are off, right? And it's hard to do business when you can't get to your databases, or if your customers don't know about your products, or whatever else that isn't possible without IT.

The solution is always to strike a proper balance between expansion and consolidation in all of your departments, lest they grow too large and consume too much of your resources, or fail to grow enough to keep up with the rest of the company. It doesn't matter if we're talking about IT or R&D.

IT doesn't matter -- but not being a moron matters

[crmartin]

Like most of these things, the answer to the question is not "yes" or "no". Having the best new technology doesn't matter: lots of companies are still running happily on one variant or another of the IBM 360 architecture.

What does matter is that some business models that work don't work unless you have the right (new, or new-ish) technology: you can't have an Amazon.com without advanced web systems, or you can't have it feasibly and cost-effectively.

On the other hand, having a new 20-inch iMac on every desktop doesn't much matter. (Drat.)

The trick with IT -- and about everything else in business -- is to really figure out what does matter to the business, and to work your ass off optimizing that thing that matters.

True but....

[Fnkmaster]

A big part of the reason software lets businesses down is that they are often paranoically afraid of change at the middle management layers (pardon, but I fucking hate the word IT, and I find it devoid of meaning so I'll stick to terms that mean something to me).

Basically, companies don't want to change the way their fundamental "business processes" work even when these "processes" don't make any sense. So if you take the same old inefficient way of doing things, and make software to facilitate it, you're still doing it inefficiently. Especially when requirements for "visionary" systems get bogged down with specification by committee - everybody wants to make sure that their department or group level jobs are represented and that nobody designs them out of the picture. Even if a top level executive recognizes that the way things works is too costly and generally sucks, if lots of mid-tier shitheads play the bureaucracy card and bog a system down until it's in le toilette, well, no surprise when the software you end up with is no better than the way you do things now.

It also doesn't help that "IT" is the result of years and years of evolution and almost NOBODY in the business IT world is sufficiently bright to take the big picture, generalize about it, and create a logical, functioning infrastructure to replace it. No, the people who are smart enough to do this generally work for tech-focused companies in more interesting jobs where there are tiers upon tiers of bureaucratic wretchedness breaking everything down.

View from a government agency

[scarpa]

I work for a local government agency and I see firsthand how the promise of IT is a double-edged sword.

In my department we recently replaced 75 green-screen terminals. Many, many people were happy to see this happen, but in reality most of the new PCs are simply running terminal emulators and are glorified dumb terminals.

So on the face of it, we didn't really do anything but spend a lot of money and make everything prettier... ON THE SURFACE

However, now that the infrastructure is in place, we can begin to really look forward. We are now considering projects that have the promise of eliminating hours of uneccessary work each day and of making public information much more accessible both online and at local kiosks, just to name a couple.

The key is that you can't just implement new technology for technologies sake, which was kinda what the whole "bubble" was all about. You have to take a long term view of how and why you will leverage that technology going forward. May seem obvious to us, but not to all.

Two edged sword...

[Anonymous Coward]

Shoring up what you already have is always a good idea, but - should you be doing it? Firefighting is the most non-productive thing an IT department can do, yet is always required to a degree, whether it be battling the latest worm because of a flawed IT policy, or helping Jane Doe with her print problem. Ongoing shoring up is part of IT, but in many companies I've seen, they seem to go through vast periods of cutbacks and inactivity, then somehow fixate on how one new system will be introduced to fix all flaws. IT doesn't work like that.

Then on the other hand, you have cutting edge technologies. Well, yes they can help you out if you have a problem that they solve, but there's no point trying to find a problem for them to solve because they're there. I know one company that ripped up a perfectly good CRM system built in house so they could access the database using web services. Totally pointless. Yet, I know another company that has rolled out an intranet, built a document repository and that has garnered much more immediate results.

So, my answer is a straight 50:50. Firefight, but implement policies that make your job easier as you do so, so you can reduce overall costs, and only implement newer systems if they are required, and even then, don't be blinkered by the latest technologies. Sure, it may be cool, but early adopters always bear the price, but not necessarily the fruits.

The thing is, some of these points are common sense, some need time, and in business you can be guaranteed that people lack both.

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.

Ja Nie

[smchris]

Someday, the people who know how to use computers will rule over those who don't. And there will be a special name for them: secretaries.

--Dilbert (as if anybody here didn't know that)

actually, he's correct

[23]

What he says is, that the whole of IT is becoming a commodity, just like electricity. Having it is essential, but it doesn't give you a strategic advantage in business, since others have (to have) it also.

I actually think he's right. IBM e.g. effectively commoditisized (if that's a word) PCs by opening up the their standards years ago, MS having the complentary product "OS/Office" that made them superrich. Consider this: Having Win+MSOffice (please no religious zealotry...:) ) might have given you an advantage 10 yrs ago, if you were one of few and could reorganize your business processes to be much more efficient using it. Nowadays, everybody has it and needs it, you loose that advantage.

This guy Carr just generalizes that to the whole of IT, including the "new" stuff like the net. Beats me, why IBM is crying foul, since they are running this huge PR campaign of "IT as a utility" which is exactly that.

just my 2 cents

Re:The question is when will IT blow itself out?

[Che Guevarra]

Here's why he's wrong. Supply Chain Management. E-commerce has completely re-written all the rules of businesses and the information sharing btwn them up and down the supply chain from resource suppliers to recyclers. Does anyone here know why they're able to get something they've ordered on the internet (even a computer) shipped in 3 days? Because of the changes IT has made on the Business model. Most people who know what they're talking about believe 'SAME DAY SHIPPING" is not a dream but a reality within a year or two. If IT can accomplish that, there are no ceilings.

I intended a Zen

[bob_calder]

approach to the issue. Neither agression nor defense. Just do what needs to be done. I can't tell you how much the misuse of analogy in my industry affects me. People don't just go wrong. They do it spectacularly by thinking that life is an analog of *insert the name of a sport here*. Obviously things in life are similar, but they are separate and should stay that way. Men and women, stuff like that. :-)

Re:I intended a Zen

[0x0d0a]

If you can have a better mousetrap built, then you better do it before your competitors do.

I disagree.

This may hold water if you're a mousetrap manufacturer. If it's your core product at stake, sure. But IT is a support system, almost always a cost center. The question is whether the latest-and-greatest from HP, Sun, and Oracle is really worth latest-and-greatest prices. Is having a product that's two years newer going to save your company how much you're dropping on it?

The huge gains that came from computers were when, say, Levi decided to computerize inventory management. Now it's computerized. They don't have to worry about warehousing junk where it isn't needed or paper mistakes costing them huge sums of money. Are they going to save more money by using a new HP system with WhizBang-3d-with-sound GUI analysis instead of IBM's old system? Maybe some, but nothing like the gains that have already been realized.

Furthermore, even if the IT spending is worthwhile, spending it on *products* may not be a good idea. If a CIO decides to drop five million dollars on software licenses, that's 100 man years of IT work that he's just exchanged for latest-and-greatest. If he does this every five years, he's losing 20 support personnel. Twenty people can get an awful lot of work done.

Walmart moving to RFID tags could save a *lot* of money, because they eliminate a lot of human work. However, there are two reasons jumping ahead like this ain't necessarily a great idea. First, RFID is a potentially big money saver, but advances like it also don't come along very often. Second, a lot of IT purchases and decisions turn out to be *bad* moves. If you let your competitors lead, and let them soak up the costs of development, only copying them when they do something that works well, yes, you lose a bit of lead time. You might have to absorb some losses. But you also gain a lot of money, and have time to let competing vendors enter the market space.

This is one reason why a lot of successful big companies are pretty conservative. Microsoft doesn't actually try very many new things for a tech company (and when it does, it tends to not do very well). Microsoft does *much* better by sitting around, waiting for masses of tiny companies to try various things, and then buy the one or two that succeed. Sure, they have to pay a hefty price for the one, but they let hordes of VCs fund their development and testing, rather than having to do it themselves. Most of Microsoft's primary products were originally developed by other companies that were then acquired.