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Why I.T. Matters
Anonymous Coward writes "Technology Review has an interesting story from the inventor of the Ethernet refuting the claim that IT has lost its strategic value." Our earlier story summarizes the original claim: that there's little to be gained by staying at the forefront of technology.
Of course I.T. has value, just because everyone has it doesn't make it worthess. Imagine a new startup that didn't have email and web access resorting to faxes, snail mail and the library for all its research. They'd be out of business in no time.
I can't imagine Henry Ford saying "Horseless carriages have no value because everyone has them."
Trolling is a art,
Will always drive the world. Not always in the spotlight but will control almost everything. From cave men to now Information and Technology have always been the way to advance. Always will be.
My father's been in IT since the beginning (about 30 years). Here's what he had to say about Carr's article (from my email archives):
---
This is a horrible article in many more ways than I thought.
The author is fundamentally wrong, and I intend to prove why.
The foundations of his "fundamental error" can be found early on in the article, when he draws a parallel between IT and various other "things" (telegraph, engines, etc.). Go check it out, neatr the bottom of the second page (page 6 in the original HBR pagination). In the attached PDF, you'll see my yellow highlights, and my annotations, which summarize my objections to the article.
Here's the fundamental error. The parallel he makes is not valid at all. You can tell by observing that the author's examples (steam engine, railroad, telegraph, telephone, generator, internal combustion engine) do NOT fit his argument AT ALL - because they are NOT in any way similar or comparable to IT.
First off, those examples are NOT technologies. They are instances, mere temporal "instantiations" of some technologies. Second, when you look at his numerous examples, you can see that they are merely milestones - some of the many - that have characterized the development path of just TWO technologies: the technology of transportation, and the technology of communication. And you also realize that each new milestone in that list DID represent strategic competitive advantage, regardless of the ubiquity of the two underlying technologies (which have been around nearly forever).
In a very real sense, then, it is RIGHT THERE that the author begins to unwittingly undermine his own argument:
If it is indeed true (as it is, and as he himself later states) that each of those milestones DID create strategic advantage for early adopters and smart or insightful users (key detail, please take notice: for early adopters and smart or insightful users) -- it then follows that there IS ample historical proof of the great long-term strategic value that is inherent in communication technology and in transportation technology. The ubiquity of those technologies is an irrelevant issue, it is entirely besides the point. People have ALWAYS had some form of transportation and and some form of communication. But that dosn't mean that each of those technologies "doesn't matter". Quite the opposite, they both DO matter a lot. But what evidently must matter THE MOST, self-evidently for me but apparently not for the author, must be the FORMS they take, the HOWS of the ways in which the techology is being UTILIZED and/or EXPLOITED, which ultimately boils down to that key but little-noticed clause about early adopters and smart insightful users!...
When everybody walked, the first wheel made a key difference.
When everyone had wheels, the first horse made a key difference.
And so on, and so forth...
But that's precisely what the author FAILS TO SEE in the proper light, even though he often uses examples that suggest precisely the opposite of his conclusions.
Through this fundamental initial error of perspective, the author's whole viewpoint is fatally skewed and blindsighted throuhgout the article. From the shallowness of this initial analysis, and from the appalling intellectual superficiality of these fundamental non-sequiturs which are put forth as his basic premises and laid out up front as keystones of his whole perspective -- the author ends up drawing even more fallacious and yet VERY DANGEROUS conclusions.
His conclusions are dangerous to the innumerable run-of-the-mill, middle-of-the-road, mediocre managers everywhere, who are not mentally equipped to catch this fundamental ERROR in the author's argument, and who therefore will be lulled into BELIEVING the author's conclusions.
I maintain that these managers, and their businesses, will be SWEPT AWAY INTO OBLIVION, just as they've been in the past, by those other and much more sharp-minded managers who don't believe this bullshit for a mi
Solely for the fact that if your competitor has it, and you don't, he's not your competitor, he's the guy who just beat the crap out of your bottom line.
IT hasn't lost its value. It has just become more of a blue-collar job.
The owls are not what they seem
More people actually learned about the technologies used instead of just blindly assuming what they use is good. Maybe if more people learned instead of just being a paper MCSE, IT would matter more.
Not that I agree with the initial argument, but I believe the point is that it does not have *strategic* value. For example a business does not try to get ahead by providing a better delivery service to its customers, it simply uses UPS or FedEx. That is to say, delivery or fulfillment has no strategic value, its not a differentiator in the marketplace.
...neither of them know that part of IT that handles support of a company with 200+ windows 95/98 computers.
but not having IT is a strategic disadvantage
None of us would be able to lose our jobs to foreigners willing to do teh work for 25% of the pay and none of the benefits!
THANK YOU DARPA!
-rt
Our earlier story summarizes the original claim: that there's little to be gained by staying at the forefront of technology.
This really is the crux of the matter.
Technology/I.T. Matters. Always has and will always be that way, but where do you want to be placed on what could be called a Yardstick of inovation/money expended to stay at the "Tip of the Spear" ?
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. -- Hunter S. Thompson
but it is going away, as the US is rapidly becoming a nation of services and intellectual property.
IT in and of itself is quite useful. Our world is quite locked in to using technology.
Some modern improvemnts, however, are of little strategic value (to the vast majority of customers).
Take Microsoft's updates to Word in the past years. The significance of the updates in Word from Office 2000 through XP to 2003 is little to none. Thanks to backwards compatibility, I can run an old Linux box to serve websites, and it won't matter that the technology is from 1998 (assuming I secure the machine).
I wouldn't say innovation is worthless, but a lot of IT has become maintaining unecessary updates.
A business can make wise or foolish investments. IT is no different. Like many other things, the value of IT is often hard to quantify.
I suspect that, unless a one has a really clear idea of how to benefit from being at the cutting edge of IT, it is better to be conservative. Being at the cutting edge can consume all of your time, not to mention money. Is the extra profit worth the effort? If your business is making widgets, concentrate on the widgets and buy just enough IT, no more.
The question here is whether an emphasis on cutting-edge IT makes businesses more profitable. What else factors into that besides profit?
The point he was making (let me restate it) is that treating everything solely on its ability to make money for you (usually in the next quarter) is a sure way to lose money. I think that matters a fair bit when you're trying to turn a profit.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Harvard Business Review has 243,000 extremely influential readers. So if it publishes an article saying that information technology doesn't matter, then an awful lot of important business leaders are going to believe it
this means two things:
a) an awful lot of important business leaders are unable to read a magazine (or has it printed on it's front "TRUTH"?)
b) we need an awful lot of new important business leaders. pick me, i've got a mind on my own.
beer as in "free beer"
IT used to be bleeding edge. IT used to be high-tech. IT used to be high-tech magic to which only the annointed had access.
Still is. Just because Joe Schmoe can install Oracle on a box for free doesn't make him a Data Warehouse expert, and it doesn't mean that he's capable of implementing an enterprise wide inventory management system.
Today IT is being outsourced. Today universities spew out masses of IT "experts" even if the job markets are already saturated. Today being an IT expert means that you know Java, can hack HTML and do bullet-point presentations for your managers.
Boo hoo, management is blind to the value of having workers that understand their business and can communicate with their clients and this somehow means that IT experts are worthless. Bitter much?
IT is dead. Get over it.
It's not dead, it just smells funny. You can still make a pile of cash - just convince a business that you can either increase their bottom line or lower their costs.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I find the discussions around I.T. amusing as I see concern about electronic voting, privacy, file sharing, and IP become the focus of new laws and protests.
I.T. is, at it's heart, technology enabling the collection, storage, retrieval, analysis and control of information.
(This is used to make decisions --- predictive as well as reactionally, as well as manipulate the 'ugly bags of mostly water' who's only connection to this would is via a hand full of easily confused primitive senses, and a questionable ability to accurately remember and/or interpret the data that they provide.)
He who controls the data, could appear to control the world!
I.T. will stop mattering when information stops mattering. As long as information provides power, those in IT have nothing to worry about.
Smart business people realize that IT is an important enabler in their businesses, but IT should never be looked at as a differentiator or strategic advantage in and of itself. IT can be incredibly important, but only inasmuch as it furthers the other goals of the business.
A good example is Walgreen's. They decided, some time ago, that they were going to be the most user-friendly, convenient drug store on the planet. So, they implemented a far-reaching, ground-breaking IT infrastructure that allowed the stores to all share prescription information - way before the Internet was ubiquitous. But, it was only part of their efforts to be really convenient. (Another part was to always be on a corner, but I digress.)
That infrastructure was important to achieving the goal of being a convenient drug store, but the technology itself was not the real differentiator or the goal. The goal was to make it easy to pick up your prescription at whatever store was conenient at the moment.
The problem with the dot-bomb era was that the technology was the goal, not merely the vehicle.
There might not be much of a reason to have the latest and greatest in technology. But, here in 2004, if your business hasn't figured out how customers can send you orders over the WWW yet, you're lucky to still be around.
If your competitor has better inventory accounting or demand prediction than you do, they're going to be able function better than you do, and eventually that deficit will come back to haunt you.
Being on the cutting edge gives you the risk of being burned by bad tech... but falling behind the curve is a certain path towards failure.
That's the argument made by the business "no creativity/technology ability" plebes who sucked off the internet boom like leeches and fled into thr night light vampires at the first sign of daylight.
The TRUTH is that the US business world saw some potential to make money off of the technological innovatgions coming out of Silicon Valley in the early 90s. Without thinking it through they threw massive funds into the soup, attracting totally incapable morons looking for a buck, and then when those idiots presented outrageous skyscrapers of cards to these "investment geniuses" they gave them MORE MONEY (think of bike messengers delivering $50 rolls of toilet paper here).
Now were just insulted, but THEN these morons toss the "slow and steady" tech-heads who WERE building solid business and plans to teh wind in favor of the "profit RIGHT NOW" IPO craze of the end 90s, building illusory value at an astronomical rate in the search for a buck.
You tell your boss that if she doesn't like making a living off the back of the ideas of people 10x more intelligent, innovative, and creative than she is she can go join P&G with the rest of her ilk.
I hate nothing more than idiots who make outrageous arguments with zero evidence and even less understanding.
-rt
If you have a small business, are you going to have a competitive advantage against your competitors by upgrading every seat from 10/100 ethernet to 10/100/1000 ethernet? Do you need to upgrade everyone to the latest version of MS Office? How many old CPU's need to be replaced with new ones? According to 3com, Microsoft, and Intel, the answers are "Yes", "Yes", and "All of them". According to others, the answers are "Maybe", "No", and "Depends on how old each one is".
Start a happiness pandemic
Large and successful restaurants rely heavily on IT. Many large restaurants and increasing numbers of smaller ones do have web sites. The sites give directions to their restaurants, menus and even the abillity to place orders for pickup and sometimes delivery. I'm not talking pizzas here, I'm referring to all sorts of restaurants including upscale seafood, French, Italian and many more.
But, even without websites, the large and successful restaurants still rely on IT. They use IT to manage their books and their staff. They also use it to manage their inventories, making sure that they have sufficient quantities of lettuce and steak at all times. They use IT to manage the ordering system and the billing system. They even use it to manage the crowds by way of table charting and remote paging systems.
Restaurants rely very heavily on IT and the successful ones would not be successful withou IT. Just have a look around when next you are at McDonald's. Try to imagine operating McDonald's corporation or even a single franchise without IT.
Sure there are some hold outs, mom and pop operations that do OK (well enough to support two people) without IT. But name a restaurant that can seat 400 people that doesn't rely on IT. Name a chain that doesn't rely on IT. I'm often amazed to see more and more small mom and pop restaurants that are using IT to automate various processes in their business. It is a strategic advantage for them because without it, they would go out of business.
Your boss is not a typical manager. There is still hope. Bail while you can. Don't let her break your spirit.
management is blind to the value of having workers that understand their business and can communicate with their clients and this somehow means that IT experts are worthless.
If we are worthless in the eyes of the people who pay us, then we ARE de facto worthless. What you think of your own worth does not matter.
Companies do not value domain knowledge in IT workers much for whatever reason. I have not figured out why, but it seems to be the case.
Table-ized A.I.
Not an oxymoron, and by saying so you sort of perpetuate the whole silly techie/businessman divide. Of course you DO have a legitimate gripe.
The thing to keep in mind is that few people in any profession are very good at it (or sadly, have an honest interest in getting good and staying good at it), that goes for both technical work or management.
Pretty much the only answer to:
is to point out that all those "techies" reported to management, and any decent manager takes a large portion of the blame for a failure.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
The days of purchasing $1 million dollars of Cisco routers is over for all but the very largest businesses. I really like the plumbing analogy to IT. After all, anybody can go to the local Home inprovement store and get a whole house full of plumbing for a reasonable price...but making a WORKING plumbing system is an entirely different story!!!! Plumbing is unique to your home, terrain, and personal needs. While there are standards for pipe sizes and fittings each person's home is different, so the job will always need to be "personally" done. Plumbers make good middle-class money...there's nothing wrong with that, those are the type of jobs we need in the gobal ecomomy.
IT is also like accounting though. The REAL issues with IT are not fighting the latest virus or configuring expensive routers, the REAL VALUE in IT is properly matching hardware and software to the goals and needs of the company!!! IT has to start demonstrating real value to the company!!! The "boys with toys" stage is over and it's time for IT people to start understanding HOW a business works and Why they need IT, not just installing cool toys.
Of course the real issue is that these "harvard business school" guys teach everything in knee-jerk reactions, not moderation...look how they missed the focus on quality performance in the 70s and 80s. The same half-assed, it's-not-makeing-us-rich-now group think is back in action all over again! The problem is that YOUR boss is going to read this trash with the same "focus" that we'all have for slashdot! Those "brilliant" executives are really no more intelligent or independant thinking than most slashdoters..it's just a "richer" club.
Its also a thing of perspective, from his its true. Hes seems to be all about making big money, for big manager types. OS has mostly failed those types, and the pushers of OS are happy for it. (unless your IBM) Same with this story, IT doesnt seem to be a sure fire way to get a lot of money going through the company these days, so its useless from their point of view.
To my mind, there are four areas where IT projects can help the enterprise:
- Reducing costs, by reducing things like utility/communications bills and headcount, replacement of expensive technology with faster, cheaper alternatives and generally lowering TCO. In other words reducing the cost per unit of work.
- Increasing enterprise efficiency and productivity, by enabling increased output with the same size labour force.
- Enabling the enterprise to take advantage of new opportunities in the market place, with some new technology. In other words, allowing some new process to occur that opens up new revenue opportunities.
- Mitigating risk by allowing compliance with regulatory bodies or increasing security (thus protecting things like intellectual property etc).
Any new IT project has, IMHO, to deliver on at least one of the above, preferably several of them. I have worked on successful projects that have had or more of the above characteristics (e.g. building high performance computing environments that allow interpreters of seismic data to produce more accurate drilling decisions more quickly) and others that were failures because they had none of the above. At the end of the day, it is up to we IT professionals to demonstrate added value when going cap in hand to our respective employers asking for money.
As for the original authors contention that the competitive advantage has gone out of IT, what rubbish! We haven't even scratched the surface of what is possible with IT. After all, the science has only been around for half a century. Did Ford or Boeing decide that nothing more could be done after the Model T or 707? Of course not, those visionary companies knew that those achievements were just the start. It is in our nature as humans to want to push the envelope and make things bigger, better, faster and cheaper. IT will be part of that process for some time to come.
OOPS! Forgot to change Formatting Type on the last one
For the record I can attest to this. I went to the University of Waterloo (not CompSci, Arts but transferred out after first year to another school). And a lot of my Dorm mates were in computer science. I started at the very height of the boom 1999-2000. Incidentally I've always liked computers. That's why I transferred to another school to take compsci.
Anyway, back to my point. There were a lot of people in compsci at waterloo seeing as it's known (in Canada at least) for its computer science courses. But here's the kicker: Many of the people I spoke with didn't like computer science. In fact some outright hated it. But they had the grades in highschool (92% and up) to get into compsci at waterloo. They would say that they went into compsci because there were lots of good jobs and people got paid really well. It was quite discerning to be fixing peoples computers who knew jack crap about them. (Like someone who's printer didn't work, it didn't have a USB or parallel cable, she just figured plug it into the wall, install drivers, print!). I always thought you went to university to do something you liked. But here I was on a floor of people (not all, some actually loved computers and Linux and warez etc etc and others were in different programs) who were in one of the top schools for computer science, leading the way for computational studies and they couldn't get on the internet because the network cable wouldn't fit into their modem. It was just a means to an end for some of them. Just a training course for their job. That's not why I left. I left because I wasn't good enough in math to take computer science there but knew that that's what I wanted to do. I like programming and all that jazz(!) so I liked taking the courses. But still to this day it makes me so angry that there are people who decided one day to take computer science because the money was good.
There's another IT archetype I hate. The "I'm no longer going to drive this bus, I'll get my MCSE and make real money" IT Professional. Those to me are the people who make up the bulk of IT these days. Sure they know things. They know how to solve IT problems, so long as its in the book. They know how to setup an SQL server so long as it's MSSQL. Do they know the fundamentals? Maybe, but do they care? Do they know what it means? Do they try and think up new solutions to their current problems? These are the ranks of IT. These are the people who were hired like MAD during the boom and populate every IT workshop. These are the people who know enough to help out and have enough work experience to land another job. They may have 5 years experience at company XYZ. Does that translate into a good IT worker? To HR and management it sure does. The MCSE's don't really care past what they did to get their job. Learn asp? Work better pay for the training and certificate. Learn Linux? Work better pay for that as well. Maybe I'm abnormal. Maybe I thought I'd see IT as a place where everyone would like computers and be interested in shaping them to mould the rest of the business. Maybe I thought IT would be filled with people who are interested in new and emerging technologies to better help the rest of the company. I don't know what I thought. But I sure as hell didn't expect to get out off school to see IT shops full of sheep. IT Shops full of people just trying to make a buck and squeeze the last drop out of the company before they leave. IT offices with people who could care less about simple IT principles and more about making sure they get their 1 hour scheduled lunch break. I can't even begin to explain the level of fear some of the people have here with regards to Linux. Why? Not because it's worse than the MS counterpart. Not because it's slower, more CPU intense, has a higher (if you believe the advertising) TCO. But because it might mean loosing out on watching American Idol for one night to learn ipconfig == ifconfig or that ls == dir. I actually fear for the IT shops all over the Americas. Yes th