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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,
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):
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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
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
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
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
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.
There's nothing wrong with plumbing. Those guys get paid rather well and they don't have to do jack.
You're nothing; like me.
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...)