IT Doesn't Matter (HBR OnPoint Enhanced Edition)
by Nicholas G. Carr
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Book Summary Information
Author: Nicholas G. CarrEdition: Digital
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Download: PDF
Published: 2003-05-01
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 28
Publisher: Harvard Business Review
Book Reviews of IT Doesn't Matter (HBR OnPoint Enhanced Edition)
Book Review: I think that this is obscurantism, plain and simple
Summary: 1 Stars
"OBSCURANTISM is a word that's no longer used these days. In the forties, it was a favorite of literary and social critics. The dictionary defined it as "a deprecation of or positive opposition to enlightenment or the spread of knowledge, especially a policy (as in art or science) of deliberately making obscure or withholding knowledge from the general public," also a "style (as in literature and art) characterized by haziness and lack of sharp definition." (from Obscurantism.(Opinion & Editorial)
This is fully applicable to Carr writings. Haziness and lack of sharp definition are typical. Carr used focus on IT shortcomings to propose a new utopia: users are mastering complex IT packages and perform all functions previously provided by IT, while " in the cloud" service providers fill the rest. This is pretty fine humor not no much more.
The key problem with the current IT its "dilbertalization". That's why IT is often perceived as hostile to business interests. With WAN based service providers dilbertalization of IT just moves to other buildings.
Carr approach to IT is completely anti-historic. This is the first and major problem with his article. IT already experienced several dramatic transformations. Also complexity of IT systems has no precedents in human history and as such analogies with railways and electrical grid are deeply and irrevocably flawed as they does not capture the key characteristic of the technology: its unsurpassed complexity and Lego type flexibility.
The second aspect of his anti-historical approach is that Carr profess a very narrow and static definition of IT. During 60 year of IT evolution its role dramatically changed at least a dozen times. The first applications of IT were military calculations. Then batch computing became dominant and report generation became prominent. With mainframes came time-sharing and first "enterprise" applications like airlines and railway ticketing systems. Later come mini and micro computing revolutions which make computers a commodity like telephone. The next act in this drama was emergence of Internet and Web technology and wireless communications which put computer in the cell phone like iPhone. There is no guarantee that this is the last transformation.
The second problem with Carr views is absolutization of service provider model and propaganda of "bandwidth communism". As for his prediction of eminent switch to WEB based service providers so far he proved to be a very poor forecaster: there no significant movement to this model five years after publication. IT employment in datacenters had grown in all years since 2003 (in 2007 by 7-8%). So much about the death of the datacenter. Also the power of laptops is such that to provide even 30% of it via remote applications is very problematic and extremely costly. Streaming of applications might make sense but remote applications outside simplistic like WEB-mail and WEB hosting face challenges.
The other interesting problem is that IT costs in large enterprises are already minimized (often 1-3% of total costs) and further minimization does not bring much benefits (what can you save from 1% of total costs; but you can lose a lot). the question arise: why bother ?
Now about Carr bandwidth communism. WAN bandwidth is not free and contrary to Carr's views reliable 24x7 communication with remote datacenter cannot be achieved via public channels and buying dedicated WAN links can be extremely expensive: for mid-side companies it is usually as expensive as keeping everything in house. That makes problematic "in the cloud" approach to any service where disruptions or low bandwidth in certain times of the day can lead to substantial monetary losses. Also bandwidth is limited: for example OC-1 and OC-3 have their upper limit of 51.84Mbit/s and 155.2 Mibit/s correspondingly. There are quite a few game enthusiasts, movies collectors, etc who would like to use all publicly available bandwidth. In a sense we face here typical "tragedy of commons".
Yet another problem with Carr's views is that discounting IQ inherent in local IT staff open enterprise to various form of snake-oil salesman and IT consultants proposing their wares. And server providers are not altruists.
Lack of IT talent instantly makes a company a donor in the hands of ruthless external supplies and contractors. Consultants (especially large consultant firms) can help but they also can become part of the problem due to the problem of loyalty. We all know what happened with medicine when doctors were allowed to be bribed by pharmaceutical companies. This situation which is aptly called "Viva Viagra" and which useless or outright dangerous drags like Vioxx were allowed to became blockbusters was fully replicated in IT: myth about independence of IT consultants is just a myth (and moreover, some commercial IDS and EMS systems in their destructive potential are not that different from Vioxx ;-).
Carr's recommendation that companies should be more concerned with IT risk mitigation then IT strategy is complete baloney. Security cannot be achieved without sound IT strategy and participation of non-security IT staff. The real problem here is the place of security staff in the whole organization (usually it is never a strategic place, so they have no real say in architecture) and the level of competence of security personnel. Often the security department is just a stone on IT neck and an exile point for less competent staffers (or worse). IT architecture is of paramount importance and no amount of "risk mitigation" blah-blah-blah can change that. Also even incompetent security personnel costs money and with better architecture you can use less of this personnel which is strictly speaking an overhead (the author knows this all too well as he had spent many years in IT security ;-).
All-in-all Carr proposed just another dangerous utopia and skilfully milked the controversy the article generated in his two subsequent books.
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