Difference between revisions of "Talk:Student Projects:Does IT Matter"

Revision as of 21:36, 5 November 2004

I know a couple of you like the WIKI format, so here are some thoughts I had as to ways of cutting the topics and discussion for the meeting before class this Thursday....

erik jansen

1. Is Carr’s assertion that IT is “available and affordable to all” accurate? Does this ignore the economics of scale and the affordability of sufficient support to extract identical amounts of benefit, regardless of organization size? Said another way, is Carr right/wrong, but only in cases of certain size or other dimension. Is small business eternally damned to IT hell (vs. other larger or more far flung players)?

2. Is there a scale element (or other remarkable organizational attribute) to the decision to fund/deploy IT innovations outside a developing organization as a product for mass consumption (entrepreneurism) vs. the decision to keep in internal for strategic advantage (“intra”preneurism)? Or is this simply an “age of innovation” dynamic (early innovators in a sector of IT know-how, as was the early IBM, have no mass market to clearly deploy and sell their products)?

3. Is the transportation analogy appropriate or just simple and convenient? Does transportation (not just railroads) have an analog to the logarithmic growth that data processing power has (Moore’s law or Lentz’s law). Will Carr claim the high ground when Moore’s law breaks (as many as definitively and reasonably convincingly doing) in a decade?

4. Many say that computing (IT) as we know it lacks a paradigm to take it past the limitations of Van Neumann approaches. (Neurons “compute” in milliseconds vs. pico/femto seconds for transistors) Will Carr’s arguments reset (become faulty) if/when a new computing paradigm is launched (or will his process of technical dispersion/dilution be played out again in “fast forward”)?

5. Is the recent attention to Open Source S/W and Linux-based OS a confirmation or contradiction to Carr’s thesis?

6. (Here’s an idea set I would like to develop I think) Could we create a list of contradictions to Carr’s assertions that exist today – A single well argued exception refutes a generalization. I can think of several areas of IT where strategic edge is being built: tools for accelerating pharmaceutical research/drug discovery, approaches of data mining for more predictive retailing/merchandising, algorithms for optimizing/hardening data-communications routing, logistics mapping tools for more robust mfg and operations support, to name a few. Do these defy his claims – i.e. that IT innovation is no fodder for meaningful strategic advantage. Or are these applications outside what he would consider IT? I think his use of growth curves in this argument is contrived: he treats them like they were S-adoption curves for purposes of supporting his maturation theme. But they are not S-curves. I wonder if one could use venture capital investment levels into IT and Software sectors over time and equity values in the stock markets as measures (proxies) for the perception of strategic value by “smart” investors. Isn't economic gain (profits and the equitization of those perceptions) the quintessential definition of strategic advantage in the context of business? Any ideas here? Am I nuts?

7. Carr’s argument that companies should stop the pointless replacement of “obsolete” hardware misses a major point – hardware is not replaced because its cool to do so (although there certainly was an office social thing to who got the latest hot PC in the 80’s), but rather because the cost of maintaining it to operational and standards conformance outstripped the cost of simply putting a new, certifiably compliant machine in place. It was classically poor/unfortunate asset management (not unlike a pure production tool on the manufacturing floor that is no longer as efficient as a newer model), not an IT-related phenomenon per se.

8. Related to the above thought is: Is the real issue here that IT is intrinsically quite inflexible (recoding costs high, legacy issues being what they are, etc.) in a business environment that is increasingly dynamic and demanding of nimbleness? In this sense, IT merely subjects every user (that is company) to a fixed, high cost asset that can become obsolete overnight. Is this not the real issue that drives Carr to say its time to manage IT by “just saying no”?

9. I find the many discussions about IT affecting business processes to be an intuitively powerful one. With the fact that deploying IT innovation nearly always adds complexity and change to the way organizations need to operate, is there an intriguing angle here that says its the way IT is managed that most often impacts the strategic value it can provide? Carr says little or nothing about this. He seems to lock into the generic movement and reproducibility of bytes, etc. I have never been in an organization where IT was so generically deployed.

10. Ineffective (wasteful) IT Capital spending is very common – I believe because the complexity of the products are so high, the certainty of achieving functionality and ROI payoff so low, that mistakes cannot help but be made. Yet some organizations do deploy IT better than others (look at Wal-Mart, Dell – both standouts in exceptionally low margin/competitive industries). Does Carr mistake a tough practice for a categorically non-existent one?

11. Related to the above argument, just as one can argue that email, RDBMS, web services etc. are commodities, so is advertising – available to any bidder willing to pay the going rates. Yet some get a better payoff for their advertising investments (and some get dreadful results – we all know of advertising flops – coca cola classic, etc. vs. “Got Milk”, etc.). Does this mean “Advertising doesn’t matter”?

12. Look at Carr’s definition of IT – data storage, data processing and data transporting. These are primitives, not IT technologies. They seem so much more static concepts than the dynamic nature of IT tools that combine all three in creative, co-dependant and synergistic ways. Is there a problem here with his baser premise and definition of IT? What are these three static analogs in his paradigms of railroads, electrical utilities, etc.

13. Is the better analogy for Carr’s argument really the invention of language? Especially when one adds the skills of writing (storage), reading/cognitive thinking (processing), and speaking (transport). At what point did “language not matter” to early cavemen?

14. Does Carr commingle the concepts of scale, network effects and commoditization?

15. Is Apple Computer continued existence a contradiction to Carr’s thesis? Shouldn’t they be dead if IT didn’t matter (to the graphics arts, music and creative industries)?

Additional Possible Subtopics

Here are some additional possible ideas for subtopics, or areas for further exploration) I mentioned at the group meeting:

1. Why did IT have no discernable effect on productivity until the mid-1990s? Did the standards of measure change or the fundamental nature of IT expenditures?

2. Why have IT productivity gains been unevenly distributed? Is it truly a function of competitive circumstances by industry or perhaps something else?

3. Why does IT spending not correlate with corporate performance? Do “better” companies simply reduce spending during slow economic times?

4. Is Carr’s definition of IT correct, i.e. the storing, and processing and transportation of digital information? Would another, perhaps broader, definition refute or support his suppositions?

5. What are good technology comparisons i.e. are railroad, telegraph and electricity truly relevant to Carr’s suppositions or would other comparisons refute or support his suppositions?

6. How do grid computing and web services refute or support Carr’s suppositions and what effect might they have on his recommendations?

7. Transaction and spatial organizational costs greatly affected organization size. Which is dominant today and what would be effect if Carr’s suppositions are correct and his recommendations followed?

-Al