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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
Why I.T. Matters
Shhhhhhhh.....I.T. flew out the window!
For a while there I thought my degree was useless! Sure wish I hadn't turned down those jobs because they were not strategically sound though...
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.
I believe Cisco (aka the Bandwidth Growers Association) likens enterprise IT fabric to oxygen -- its just something you must have to keep the business running. Like oxygen, IT is now taken from granted.
For myself and my wife, we could not do what we do or earn what we earn without the Internet or our Macs.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
but not having IT is a strategic disadvantage
My boss is a non-techie managerial type. (This is scary, as I work for a Web site.) She told me, to my face, within a week of starting work there, that "the dot-com bust was the fault of you techies." She makes no bones about the fact that she hates techies, and blames them for people like her losing lots of money during the dot-bomb.
The problem is the incredibly facile mindset of the typical manager. All they think about is profit. As a result, they think of trends, technologies, even people as "a good way to make me money" or "not a good way to make me money." That's about all they see in anything; it's a sort of managerial binary.
For a period, during the dot-com era, computer geeks like us lived like rock stars, because the Powers That Be in the business world had become convinced that "geeks are human money machines"-- that "IT" (let's face it, "IT" is just a corporate way of saying "computers and computer geeks, as they relate to business") existed to help fill their coffers, and that a computer-- by definition!-- was a machine to make rich people richer.
Then came the dot-bomb, and now the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction (as it always does, humanity being what it is). Medium-sized businesses hire one or two techies, who are inevitably terribly overworked, to manage their entire "IT infrastructure" (read: anything involving digital technology, which means computers, network cables, routers, hubs, switches, "smart phones", PBX systems, Palm Pilots, Game Boys...) company-wide. Geeks are seen almost as traitors-- since we "failed" to make the rich folks richer. (Of course, it was their silly notion that geeks would make them rich in the first place-- but, of course, part of the mindset of a manager is to never blame themselves...) As a result, companies are under-hiring in terms of number of geeks per end-user, and to some extent under-buying in terms of computer expenditures per seat. Plain and simple, computers are seen as "something that won't make us money".
I've been saying (perhaps a bit too optimistically) for years that eventually, hopefully, some smart businesspeople (oxymoron?) will figure out that the IT budget, like everything else, works best in moderation-- that is, neither hiring geeks by the dozen because "they'll make us the next amazon.com" nor laying off all but one geek since "they failed us!". Hopefully, this will happen some day... but I won't hold my breath.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
taped on its back...
I.T. needs full-of-security-holes OS for job security.
Microsoft needs clueless I.T. people to buy their products.
Ad nauseum...
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
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
I mean, something's going to inevitably crush my soul sooner or later. It might as well be something that I can make money doing.
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.
Well, crap! If I.T. doesn't matter anymore, and they're throwing it out, I won't know how to do anything useful professionally.
Time to go into politics, I guess.
Double Compile
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.
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.
Today being an IT expert means that you know Java, can hack HTML and do bullet-point presentations for your managers.
/. poster who responded to the article reporting a lower enrollment in Computer Science by saying, "Good, now the people who actually care about Computer Science will be the only ones who get degrees." Computer Science, like Business School, was, in the last 5 years, too often the place you'd find money-hungry asslickers who don't care about anything (i.e. have no passions but the green).
Wow, you don't really get it, do you? It's precisely this kind of thinking that has allowed IT to be outsourced. The thinking that anyone who knows Java and can write HTML is good enough to be an IT worker.
If you had actually read my father's response, rather than skimming it and getting angry that it criticizes the Managerial Class (of which I assume you are either a part, or at least aspite to be a part), you'd realize that he has a much higher standard for what an IT worker should be than you do. Yea, the job market is saturated with "supposed" IT workers, but that doesn't mean it's bad for people who actually know what they're doing. Incompetent people used to be able to get well-paying jobs by just knowing Java. Now you have to prove that you are smarter than that. A lot of supposed IT workers just have money signs in their eyes. I think outsourcing is a bad idea, but I also know that the people who will suffer most from it are the people who don't deserve IT jobs in the first place.
I tend to agree with another
IT workers are not "I know Java and HTML" morons. Real IT workers are people who can integrate computer systems and make a business run smoother. The truth is, real IT workers should be able to design and implement the systems from scratch, but should know when not to in order to save the business time and money.
I find it easy to blame even your assertion on management. Managers hire IT workers. But because the managerial class is not defined by competence, managers don't know the criteria on which to evaluate IT workers. So they hire morons. Morons fill the IT ranks, and suddenly IT gets redefined by people like you as "knowing Java and 'hacking' HTML." The smart IT workers become irrelevant in manager's eyes, because they don't know hot recognize IT workers as "smart."
So yea, blaming management sounds about right to me, actually. Even for this.
(Disclosure: Personally, I don't plan to go into IT, at least not permanently, though I am pursuing a computer science degree...)
I know most people won't RTFA, but here's a reason to feel smug about it:
Nowadays, Metcalf is just a tool. When he had a column or two, he kept predicting that the internet would "collapse" due to too much traffic "any day now." He used that theory as a justification for per byte metering. Despite proving himself wrong over and over, he never gave up on this prediction (or at least he didn't give it up before I gave up reading his columns).
He also liked to refer to Open Source as Open Sores on a bunch of "hippies." The guy is a dinosaur. Also, clearly not very smart in the business acumen department either, 3com was essentially stolen from him.
Wow, if B.M. says it, it's probably false. Remember, this is the guy who claimed that Linux (and "Open Sorse" software) would fail.
:P
Although his most amazing prediction was that the internet would never catch on, because it would be too difficult to find pornography. I kid you not. His reasoning was that people would flood the net with discussion of online porn's legality, thus making legitimate porno impossible to find. (I wish I could still find the link, ah well. This was back in the day when the Communications Decency Act was being debated)
Well, anyway I'm proud to do my part to help keep the internet running
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This recent trend of increasingly blaming foreigners for rapid outsourcing is exaggerated. Blame the corporations who will sell out anyone to streamline profits for CEOs.
I've noticed a conspicuous absence in people mentioning open source here, strange given Linux server use is up about 30% this quarter. It seems a lot of slashdotters have fingers in proprietary programming and open programming pies. Not that this is a bad thing.
Slashdot should come up with a scale or ratings system with a moon as an icon signifying the quantity + quality of tech topics in crescent, half, three quarters and full moon chunks. Topics represent either the light or dark side, open code and hidden code respectively. To expound on software architecture differences there can be a series of moons each with a classification.
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.