Author Nicholas Carr's main point is that information technology is nothing more than the infrastructure of modern business, similar to railroads, electricity, or the internal combustion engine--advances that have become too commonplace for any company to wangle a strategic advantage from them.
Once-innovative technology becomes merely a necessary cost. Carr misunderstands what information technology is. He thinks it's merely a bunch of networks and computers. He notes, properly, that the price of those has plummeted and that companies bought way too much in recent years.
He's also right that the hardware infrastructure of business is rapidly becoming commoditized and, even more important, standardized. Computers and networks per se are just infrastructure. However, they are only the boring part of the IT equation.
One of the article's most glaring flaws is its complete disregard for the centrality of software. Any human knowledge or information can be mediated and managed by software. Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft's general manager for platform strategy, says that Carr doesn't put enough emphasis on this, the "I" in IT. How do you apply that to some particular business problem? Packet switching was invented as a way to digitize voice, data, and video in a matter that enabled digital computers and its associated economics to communicate, and the cost of communication sharply and suddenly dropped.
Similar situations have transpired with the advent of digitized photography, use of radio frequencies for various handheld IT appliances, and the development of such products as elevators that call in to the service center or to a computer that automatically dispatches collective software or people when a part or system is about to fail. Often, only the senior management team's imagination limits new IT-based opportunities.
New technologies will continue to give companies the chance to differentiate themselves by service, product feature, and cost structure for some time to come.
The first mover takes a risk and gains a temporary advantage longer if there are follow-on possibilities. The fast follower is up against less risk but also has to recover lost ground.
One lens should be focused on improving cost savings and efficiencies. Another should be focused on the incremental improvement of organizational structure, products, and services. Still another should be focused on the creation of strategic advantage through extending competitive scope, partnerships customers and other parties , the changing of the rules of competition, and the provision of new IT-based services to extend the customer value proposition.
Unless nurtured and evolved, IT-enabled competitive applications, like many competitive advantages, don't endure. Even historic strategic systems like American Hospital Supply's after a decade of financial malnourishment may wind up turning into a strategic liability. Others, however, like American Airlines' SABRE have shown extraordinary robustness and have permitted the survival of otherwise doomed organizations.
Evaluating these opportunities as well as thinking through their implications and timing, is vitally important, nonboring work. The new technologies will allow new things to be transformed in nonlinear ways.
Radio-frequency identification devices for grocery stores, smart cards, and automated ordering systems for hospital physicians are all examples of new process targets that technologies will soon address. In the more distant future we will see the improved creation of drugs and treatments through the ability to rapidly and more deeply analyze huge databases.
I am interested in valid reasons to diminish technology, but also in mythical reasons as well. Things people believe about the technium which may not be true, but motivate them. Here is my first cut. Please comment on alternative reasons I missed.
I think there are four basic arguments against technology, with many sub-reasons. Contrary to Nature. Technology is in opposition to nature. It is produced at the expense of nature because it destroys ecological habitats. Its steel is mined from the earth; its lumber is taken by cutting down forests; its rare metals dug from the ground; its plastics sucked from oil and then burned into the air. Its factories pave over wetlands or meadows.
Worse this destruction of natural habitat can extinguish species, an act which cannot be undone at least not yet. Even if technology halted the destruction of natural habitat, the fact that we consume large amounts of energy causes a disruption in the atmosphere, which alters the climate. Both are important, but one fits squarely inside the legal and compliance team, the other fits better in product teams. As such, the organizational practices that facilitate technical success are often ported over to ethics challenges.
This is manifested in the search for checklists, procedures and evaluative metrics that could break down messy questions of ethics into digestible engineering work. What good is fairness if it only leads to a less biased set of people harmed by a dangerous product? They, like the engineers they work alongside, are enmeshed in organizational cultures that reward metric-oriented and fast-paced work with more resources.
This ratchets up the pressure to fit in and ratchets down the capacity to object, which makes it all the more difficult to distinguish between success and failure — moral victories can look like punishment while ethically questionable products earn big bonuses.
The tensions that arise from this must be worked through, with one eye on process, certainly, but also with the other eye squarely focused on outcomes, both short- and long-term, both inside and outside companies, and as both employees and members of a much broader society.
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