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Technology

Why I.T. Matters 191

Posted by michael from the bludgeoning-a-deceased-equine dept.
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.
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Why I.T. Matters More

Why I.T. Matters

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  • initial argument was silly (Score:5, Insightful)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Friday May 28, 2004 @04:13PM (#9280927) Homepage Journal

    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."

    • You are missing the point (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sirianni ( 767971 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @04:19PM (#9280986)
      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.

      • Re:You are missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)

        by happyfrogcow ( 708359 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @04:27PM (#9281063)
        But IT does have a strategic value to UPS and FedEx, two companies whose product is not at all IT related. So they try to get ahead by leveraging IT... scanning codes on packages, automatically updating databases, end users querying those databases.

        • Re:You are missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)

          by ZoneGray ( 168419 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @05:10PM (#9281427) Homepage
          IT is important to FedEx and UPS, but few people will choose one or the other based on technology. More likely, some other factor will be more important.... lowest price, who has the nearest dropff, which one screwed up on you.

          Likewise, technology doesn't give either one a cost advantage over the other, they're both pretty equal.

          Five or ten years ago, things were evolving so quickly that a company that was year ahead of the curve had a huge advantage over a company that was a year behind the curve. Now, in most (but not all) industries, technology has evolved to the point where all companies in a certain industry are on roughly equal footing. In that sense, the original "IT Doesn't Matter" article is spot on. Of course, IT does still matter, but you now have to be a lot more selective and realistic about the returns.

          • Re:You are missing the point (Score:4, Insightful)

            by happyfrogcow ( 708359 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @05:24PM (#9281559)
            Just because you are on equal footing doesn't mean your at the top of the mountain. Maybe you can rest and catch your breath, take a look around to see the best path to the top. But in a minute your competition will start climbing again so you better as well.

            but few people will choose one or the other based on technology. More likely, some other factor will be more important.... lowest price, who has the nearest dropff, which one screwed up on you.

            Of course! technology should be transparent to the end user. Things should just improve for reasons unknown to them. UPS should be trying all sorts of things to try to keep my business. So how will UPS know where to put their next new drop off without data gathered? won't a conveniently placed drop off reduce your expenditures, helping to keep prices lower?

            IT is not a commodity. That the wrong word to use. It's a neccesity. All commodities are not neccesities and vice versa.
            • All this mountain climbing B.S. -- the answer to most business problems is right in the word business... Busy.

              Get busy, stay busy, do what your customers want, and knock off all the silly rah-rah crap about "Reaching the Peak" or "Summiting the Goal" or whatever... it turns off a lot of people on your staff just as much as it energizes others.

              All most normal people come to those big corporate rah-rah meetings to hear are two things:

              1. Are we making money?
              2. Where the after-meeting food is.

              Who wouldn't l

          • IT is important to FedEx and UPS, but few people will choose one or the other based on technology. More likely, some other factor will be more important.... lowest price, who has the nearest dropff, which one screwed up on you.

            For UPS and FedEx, IT is a way to improve their price, dropoff locations (or handling pickups), and avoiding screwing up on people. The company with the better handle on IT is going to be more efficient.

            Usually it's only smaller players who are chosen because they utilize a s

          • Re:You are missing the point (Score:4, Interesting)

            by Maserati ( 8679 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @07:27PM (#9282362) Homepage Journal
            Oh yes people do choose a shipping company based on their IT advantages. The features available for managing 20 people routinely sending FedEx shipments, each with their own billing codes, address books, tracking number lookups etc. are very important. We've recently added an admin account and 50 user accounts to our FedEx account. If they couldn't provide a way for managing all this activity we'd find an overnight provider who can.

            We're an ad agency, naturally we're weird, but we can't be the only industry who looks to IT solutions to make our lives easier.
          • IT is important to FedEx and UPS, but few people will choose one or the other based on technology.

            No, but I'd choose either of them over the US Postal Service based on their use of technology. Ever tried to track a lost USPS package? Fergit it.

          • While I agree with your conclusion, about being "a lot more selective and realistic about the returns". I have to disagree with...

            Five or ten years ago, things were evolving so quickly that a company that was year ahead of the curve had a huge advantage over a company that was a year behind the curve

            What about Google, they were a 'late' entry into the seach market business, and yet look at them now. One of the biggest problems with the 'bubble mentality' was that people thought that IT itself was the

      • Yes, but the business that tries to cut costs by using USPS in place of UPS/FedEx is running a big risk, because their competitors can ship faster and more reliably than they can.

        Running behind the market standard that everybody else is using is a differentiator in the marketplace. Just because there's a 48-way tie on an issue doesn't mean it's meaningless... all 48 need to keep themselves up at that level or they'd be at a huge disadvantage.

    • Think about it this way: (Score:5, Insightful)

      by abscondment ( 672321 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @04:32PM (#9281091) Homepage

      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.

    • Plenty of businesses get by without the latest technology. Are you saying a restaurant is going to fail because they don't have a website? I'd be more inclined to say a restaurant will fail because they invested too much in a new computer system that is prone to failure and frequent tech support calls, and requires a learning curve for new employees.

      • At the same time (Score:5, Insightful)

        by FreeLinux ( 555387 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @05:13PM (#9281469)
        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.

      • Plenty of businesses get by without the latest technology. Are you saying a restaurant is going to fail because they don't have a website?

        Any restaurant that doesn't have EFTPOS, electronic credit services, and telephones, is certainly starting from a bad position.

        And many restaurants have electronic inventory systems, fax machines for ordering new stock, electronic payroll systems, electronic accounting packages to manage their cash flows.

        And many of the competitive restaurants around my town hav


    • Imagine a new startup that didn't have email and web access resorting to faxes, snail mail

      Please define "startup".

      Not all business are IT-dependant.
      • This post looked really great with your sig on it. "Not all business are IT-dependant. I breed prizewinning clams." (This is why I have &ltTT>--<BR> at the beginning of my sig...) But let us consider the example of a business without information technology. Can you truly come up with an example of one business that cannot benefit from the use of computers? Is there any business that does not need to manage its money? This one thing alone is enough, to me, to warrant the use of a computer.

        Even

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Can you truly come up with an example of one business that cannot benefit from the use of computers? Is there any business that does not need to manage its money?

          I'm pretty sure that there are many examples of businesses not requiring IT in order to exist and function. Your example (money management) is a good one, but payroll and related accounting functions have been computerized for a long time. That's not to say that it's not valuable; my point is that traditional businesses will still function with

    • Did you read the original article?

      The Harvard Business Review article did not claim that IT was unimportant. The main gist was that IT is not a strategic advantage to the typical business, though it once was. The reason is that everyone has it these days. It's no more a strategic advantage to your business than electricity is.

      The author then argued that because everyone has it and everyone needs it, and it's not a strategic advantage, it follows that is a risk. Because it's something you have to have,

  • IT (Score:3, Insightful)

    by An-Unnecessarily-Lon ( 761026 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @04:16PM (#9280956) Journal
    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 response to Carr's article (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Morganth ( 137341 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @04:17PM (#9280961) Journal
    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
    • The question is: Is IT still developping or are we at a point where we cannon go possibly any further/ get better. If we are (A) at the point where the only possible advance left is to recode all bloatware to make it faster and no other room for improvement is left, the article your father dislikes slightly might still be right (just because IT was allways developping, does not mean it will continiue to do so for ever).
      If however, huge advancements like in the past are still possible (B), IT is not Dead, i
    • I do agree that poor management is a cancer on modern society.

      One thing that must be kept in mind is whether a new techology is being adopted for its own sake, or if it will provide a true competitive or societal advantage. Faxes improved on mail, and emails improved on faxes, but mail, email and faxes are all still necessary. Currently, there few technologies that provide such a leap forward to abolish the previous standard but the next few years may hold something new.

      Innovators don't always win, some
    • Your father is a smart man.

      1. innovation drives the economy
      2. analysis (risk management & number twiddling) is not synthesis (strategy & innovation)
      3. read more Peter Drucker.

      That's pretty good advice.

  • Outsourcing... (Score:3, Funny)

    by WwWonka ( 545303 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @04:17PM (#9280965)
    Why I.T. Matters

    Shhhhhhhh.....I.T. flew out the window!

  • Whew! (Score:5, Funny)

    by SociallyInept ( 783778 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @04:17PM (#9280970)
    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...

  • IT matters (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Trigun ( 685027 ) <evil AT evilempire DOT ath DOT cx> on Friday May 28, 2004 @04:17PM (#9280972)
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by October_30th ( 531777 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @04:18PM (#9280977) Homepage Journal
    IT hasn't lost its value. It has just become more of a blue-collar job.
    • Right. See, being the IT guy at my company is sooo Blue Collar. Any blue collar "plumber" can migrate from windows to linux - mail, domain, file servers, printers, cvs, webservers, internal dns without a second of downtime. That is what a developer does when his Tomcat server takes a shit, he calls some blue collar IT guy to fix it. riiiiight. Not to mention that I have to not only know how to administer the server, I have to be able to program Java at least on some basic level to understand how to make it
      • Sure its blue collar, being an IT Guy is more like being a General Contractor.. they're "jacks of all trades, masters of none".

        The skills you listed are what I consider "standard IT", these are baselines any "real" IT professional should know. White-collar IT will continue to be specialized skills like DBAs, architects and engineers.

        Any mechanic can change your oil but you take your porshe to a porshe mechanic for servicing, the specialization is the difference.

      • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @05:56PM (#9281803)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • OK, first off, no fair lumping plumbers and teamsters together. (How's a teamster like a refrigerator? Shut the door and the lights go out.)

          OK, that joke went right over my head. As an electrician, I'm always looking for another teamster joke, but this one makes no sense.

          How many teamsters does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

          Four. You got a problem wit' dat?

    • Blue collar how? Outside of a major colocation center where you might actually need a fork lift driver, most IT workers are employed in a suit and tie environment - though some of them are lucky enough not to have to wear either.

      On the other hand, you can hire peons at near minimum wage to do most of your PC support tasks. Sometimes they're called interns. :)

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Besides, dress code is the worst thing to gauge this on - strippers are blue collar workers.


          They got the best dress code ever.


          I'd like to see you try to walk in stripper clothes (wait, no I wouldn't) before you comment on their dress code.

          • There are male strippers and they are mostly wearing easy to remove outfits and comfortable shoes, or some kind of boots. (You know, construction, fire, cowboy, etc.)

            If I had a finely tuned physique I could think of worse jobs than waving my wang at roomfuls of drooling women. But as Mix-a-Lot says, I don't, cause I drink much brew(brou?)-ha. (ha!)

  • it might matter if... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by aramith ( 773470 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @04:18PM (#9280979)
    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.
    • 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.

      Actually it's completly the other way around:
      - People shouldn't have to worry about the technologies that they use.

      For a company to strategically differenciate itself from the competition it needs to cut costs, improve performance, increase efficiency, detect trends early and act on them swiftly, provide an

  • Strategic value of Oxygen? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @04:20PM (#9280999)
    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.

  • I guess.... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by xenostar ( 746407 )
    ...neither of them know that part of IT that handles support of a company with 200+ windows 95/98 computers.

  • commodity IT is no longer a strategic advantage (Score:5, Insightful)

    by andalay ( 710978 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @04:23PM (#9281029)
    but not having IT is a strategic disadvantage
    • What is commodity IT? what part of IT is a commodity? a web site? end user support of whatever your product is? internal support? fast network connection? 99.999% uptime? Desktop Computers?

      IT is a commodity only until you take a look at the individual peices of your IT infrastructure and look at them more closely, instead of from an abstract point of view.

      Commodity [wordiq.com]:
      In the original and simplified sense, commodities were things of value, of uniform quality, that were produced in large quantities by many d

  • ... "the inventor of the Ethernet " is a venture capitalist. Certainly the rapid adoption of new technology makes a huge difference -- to his wallet, anyway.

    Incidentally, you've got to love how Michael adds a second sentence to the submission explaining what "Does IT Matter?" means in this context, and half the people posting don't seem to have bothered to read even that!

    • Re:Of course... (Score:2, Informative)

      by mmss ( 765692 )
      Can you remember the days when ATM was THE future of network? Now it's faded into a niche market. My company believed in ATM. Later it expended a lot of money to replace its ATM technology with FastEthernet, because the ATM vendors started to get out of the ATM market.

      The adoption of new and non-consolidated technologies is a risky business. A company should do that just if it really matters.

      If everyone can buy the same technology where is the advantage? In the deep pockets required for someone to try eve

  • The swing of the pendulum (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JessLeah ( 625838 ) * on Friday May 28, 2004 @04:23PM (#9281032)
    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.
    • 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."

      Huh? The question here is whether an emphasis on cutting-edge IT makes businesses more profitable. What else factors into that besides profit?

      • The question here is whether an emphasis on cutting-edge IT makes businesses more profitable. What else factors into that besides profit?

        The point he was making (let me restate it) is that treating everything solely on its ability to make money for you (usually in the next quarter) is a sure way to lose money. I think that matters a fair bit when you're trying to turn a profit.

        • I am a "she", not a "he".
        • But their is no innovation left. Only maintance.

          So I have to agree with the manager. It brings no profit! Any old system today can run word and excel fine and with the y2k bug gone they have modern software already running.

          Unless of course something new comes out that can make them money it should be viewed upon as a cost center.

          They will still use IT of course. Only to run what they have to keep things running smoothly. This is how it should work.

          The .com did increase their profits and flexibility for

    • 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 pre
    • Your boss is not a typical manager. There is still hope. Bail while you can. Don't let her break your spirit.

    • some smart businesspeople (oxymoron?)

      Not an oxymoron, and by saying so you sort of perpetuate the whole silly techie/businessman divide. Of course you DO have a legitimate gripe. :)

      The thing to keep in mind is that few people in any profession are very good at it (or sadly, have an honest interest in getting good and staying good at it), that goes for both technical work or management.

      Pretty much the only answer to:

      "the dot-com bust was the fault of you techies."

      is to point out that all those "techies"

      • When the techie is simply doing what the manager asks for, any decent manager takes all of the blame for a failure.

        • When the techie is simply doing what the manager asks for, any decent manager takes

          all of the blame for a failure.

          It's important to keep in mind that the "techie" might be doing what the manager asks for well, or doing it very badly. Worker bees aren't automatically blameless when they screw up simply by virtue of their lowly position in the organization.

          To put it another way, when you start assigning blame there's usually plenty to go around. People both succeed and fail as a group, most of the time an

    • Moderation is an excellent idea.

      That said, for the typical corporate desktop, is there anything being done now on a 3GHz computer that couldn't have been done on a 300MHz computer five years ago? There will always be the unusual needs, but they are catered to on a case-by-case basis, such as heavy workstations for the engineering group and so on.

      It just seems wasteful for a company to replace all their computers every three years when they could do it every five years. I can see justifying it on a depar

  • Imagine a cat with a piece of buttered toast... (Score:3, Funny)

    by HungWeiLo ( 250320 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @04:24PM (#9281038)
    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...

  • Without IT... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by rtilghman ( 736281 )

    None of us would be able to lose our jobs to foreigners willing to do teh work for 25% of the pay and none of the benefits!

    THANK YOU DARPA! ;)

    -rt

    • Re:Without IT... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ftide ( 454731 )
      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
  • 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" ?

  • Of course it matters. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mr. Bad Example ( 31092 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @04:28PM (#9281069) Homepage
    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.

  • IT matters (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28, 2004 @04:29PM (#9281079)
    but it is going away, as the US is rapidly becoming a nation of services and intellectual property.

  • 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.

  • Carr's article speaks more to the past (Score:3, Informative)

    by Unnngh! ( 731758 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @04:35PM (#9281116)
    If business executives follow Carr's advice, who will provide innovation's test beds? How will new technologies find their markets?

    Some businesses need to ignore Carr's advice. Those who can afford it. I've seen (mostly during the .com boom) small companies invest ridiculous amounts in bleeding edge technology when they should have been focusing on building a viable business. Carr's article points out a lot of the faults that led to where we are now. He should be heeded.

    Metcalf seems to talk around this point and I don't think he did a very good job debunking. IT _is_ moving ahead, but I don't feel that anyone has a good grasp on where it's going.

  • IT's infrastructure (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28, 2004 @04:39PM (#9281144)
    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.

  • Really? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Lord Kano ( 13027 )
    echnology Review has an interesting story from the inventor of the Ethernet...

    Al Gore, is that you?

    LK

  • uh? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by golgafrincham ( 774723 )
    Harvard Business Review has 243,000 extremely influential readers. So if it publishes an article saying that information technology doesn't matter, then an awful lot of important business leaders are going to believe it

    this means two things:

    a) an awful lot of important business leaders are unable to read a magazine (or has it printed on it's front "TRUTH"?)

    b) we need an awful lot of new important business leaders. pick me, i've got a mind on my own.

  • Information is why IT Matters (Score:5, Insightful)

    by stumbler ( 219354 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @04:50PM (#9281244)
    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.

  • Business is a weird little ducky. It's not like you can show empirically that businesses that invest more in X do better. A lot of funny stuff going on. If I had to pick one area where you could say businesses get the best ROI for their investment, I would have to say it's lobbying. If fact if there was a mutual fund based on lobbying, I invest heavily in it myself. Actually, that's not a joke. There is such a thing as lobbying for individuals. They get tax loopholes out of it.

  • IT is a means, not an ends (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MikeMo ( 521697 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @04:53PM (#9281269)
    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.

  • Stay with the pack... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Friday May 28, 2004 @04:57PM (#9281291)
    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.

  • I'll tell you why IT matters... (Score:3, Funny)

    by painehope ( 580569 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @05:04PM (#9281360)
    it keeps people like me from stealing your TV.
  • In the early stage of its development, every technology provides profits to those who have it because it makes a differece to those who have not. But you need an investiment and that particular technology may not last long enough to compenstate the investiment. So the question at this stage is if the investiment can be justified against the risk. Naturally, there is no clear answer to the question.

    Unless you have monopoly on it, eventually the technology becomes ubiquitous and you can no longer expec
  • Does this mean the internet is going to collapse?

  • Some IT does matter, some doesn't (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gbulmash ( 688770 ) * <semi_famous.yahoo@com> on Friday May 28, 2004 @05:09PM (#9281420) Homepage Journal
    Despite the question's polarizing phrasing, the real issue seems to be "how much should you budget for IT this year?"

    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".

  • Don't RTFA - here's why (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28, 2004 @05:36PM (#9281650)
    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.

  • Bob Metcalfe!? (Score:5, Funny)

    by autopr0n ( 534291 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @05:36PM (#9281653) Homepage Journal
    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.

    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 :P

    • Re:Bob Metcalfe!? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Bluelive ( 608914 )
      Its also a thing of perspective, from his its true. Hes seems to be all about making big money, for big manager types. OS has mostly failed those types, and the pushers of OS are happy for it. (unless your IBM) Same with this story, IT doesnt seem to be a sure fire way to get a lot of money going through the company these days, so its useless from their point of view.
  • A part of me wants to see the business world forget how important "IT" is -- network infrastructure, services, and especially security. After that point I'll guess 5 more years of survival for the US economy. Then, at the last moment, they call us back in because they realize they have nothing without networks. That's when we get top pay.

  • Okay, but then.... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 )
    ....what *is* the Next Big Thing?
  • I like Ethernet. It's been good to me (, Howard), but didn't Bob Metcalfe predict the death of the Internet in 1996 [google.com] and then later say he didn't say it? It's a shame that one foolish prediction can dull a shining star, but I find myself filtering what he says through that old prediction...

    m
  • It doesn't even take a student of history, to notice the extremely long line of empires countries, and businesses that thought this way. Almost to an item, these institutions no longer make a difference in the world, those few that still exist. What has been suggested can best be summed up as an express line to the fossil record.

    * Spain sat on it's haunches canabalizing it's merchant class, while France and England grew technologically. Ultimately England and France ate Spain's lunch... nothing interest

  • IT does matter if done right... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by adam872 ( 652411 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @10:34PM (#9283123)
    To my mind, there are four areas where IT projects can help the enterprise:

    - Reducing costs, by reducing things like utility/communications bills and headcount, replacement of expensive technology with faster, cheaper alternatives and generally lowering TCO. In other words reducing the cost per unit of work.
    - Increasing enterprise efficiency and productivity, by enabling increased output with the same size labour force.
    - Enabling the enterprise to take advantage of new opportunities in the market place, with some new technology. In other words, allowing some new process to occur that opens up new revenue opportunities.
    - Mitigating risk by allowing compliance with regulatory bodies or increasing security (thus protecting things like intellectual property etc).

    Any new IT project has, IMHO, to deliver on at least one of the above, preferably several of them. I have worked on successful projects that have had or more of the above characteristics (e.g. building high performance computing environments that allow interpreters of seismic data to produce more accurate drilling decisions more quickly) and others that were failures because they had none of the above. At the end of the day, it is up to we IT professionals to demonstrate added value when going cap in hand to our respective employers asking for money.

    As for the original authors contention that the competitive advantage has gone out of IT, what rubbish! We haven't even scratched the surface of what is possible with IT. After all, the science has only been around for half a century. Did Ford or Boeing decide that nothing more could be done after the Model T or 707? Of course not, those visionary companies knew that those achievements were just the start. It is in our nature as humans to want to push the envelope and make things bigger, better, faster and cheaper. IT will be part of that process for some time to come.
  • many people have been duped about how and why it matters exactly.

    How many companies continue to pay for the same damn software year after year, even though the stuff they are using today will do the job just fine?

    Do those new features really address core problems?

    All of this spending trades people for pre-packaged solutions. This is a mistake in that everyone uses them, nobody is totally happy with them. (one size fits all problem)

    I have been watching OSS for years now, waiting for more companies to "
  • have something to do with it too.

    I think they wish IT wasn't important mostly because they don't really understand it.

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