IT Strategy

Nicholas Carr contradicts himself?

February 6, 2008 by Raj Sheelvant

Read the interview with Nicholas Carr on CIO insight, titled Nicholas Carr: Why IT will change, where he talks about his new book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google

In the interview with Ed Cone, Nicholas Carr defends that “the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least in its familiar form. It will have little left to do once the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centers and into ‘the cloud’ or ‘the grid’. Business units and even individual employees will be able to control the processing of information directly, without the need for legions of technical specialists” and “The shift seems to be proceeding quickly…”

Nicholas Carr continues to say IT is turning out to be a commodity and defends his view that he initially presented in the HBR article titled “IT Doesn’t Matter”. In that HBR article, he mentioned that IT will go the way of Electricity. Everyone can and will hook into the IT grid (similar to electricity) and in the long run it does not provide any competitive advantage to deploy IT.

To a question Ed asks “What becomes of the corporate IT function in the age of the grid?” Carr responds “Over the next five or 10 years, the technical aspect of the IT department will become less important. It will slowly evaporate as more of those experts go outside onto the grid. But the information management and information strategy elements will become, if anything, more important. The ways companies take advantage of digitized information will become more important, not less.”

I am confused here. If IT is going the route of electricity to become a commodity how will it be more important for companies to take advantage of it? I don’t see ‘Electricity Strategist’ as a role in any organization.

The fact that IT can be used to differentiate the firm from the competitors (that’s why you would want an IT Strategist in an organization) is an indication that IT Does Matter. Is Nicholas Carr contradicting himself? Well, he further clarifies on how he viewed IT when he first wrote the paper “When I wrote Does IT Matter?, I focused on the noun in “information technology.” But information has always been a critical strategic element of business and probably will be even more so tomorrow. It’s important to underline that the ability to think strategically, to think in business terms about information—whether it’s information about your business or the transformation of your products into pure information—those skills will be critically important to companies, probably increasingly important, in the years ahead”.

If you look at IT only from the sourcing (make, buy or outsource), distribution (‘grid’ or otherwise), technology (open source or custom created application) or the infrastructure (email etc) perspective you can argue that IT is becoming a commodity. I agree it’s a matter of time before all of the above component will become commodity. But to somehow pigeon hole IT in this narrowly defined aspect is a fruitless exercise, because information in the word IT encompasses critical and strategic thinking. THAT can never become a commodity!

I am happy to see Nicholas Carr clarify his stance on IT and I am in agreement with him there!

(Also read Carr’s interview in Wired magazine and the review of his new book by CIO Insight)

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