This week, Tom Sullivan of InfoWorld interviewed Nicholas Carr, author of the much talked about Harvard Business Review article “IT Doesn’t Matter“. This article, written in 2003, outlines an argument for the inevitable transition of IT from proprietary technologies to a more utility-like function, similar to telephone or electricity. If you’ve never read this article, take some time to look through it. Nicholas states that looking at how previous technologies like electricity, telephone, and the railroad progressed can tell us what will eventually happen with current technologies in the corporate IT world. His argument boils down to this: when a new piece of technology is developed, a few companies can make money for a short time by adopting them early on and creating proprietary systems to utilize this technology. However, as more and more companies adopt the same technology, the resource that was once scarce becomes “essential to competition but inconsequential to strategy”. Basically “the risks it creates become more important than the advantages it provides”. This happened as telegraph lines were installed in mass and when railroad tracks were laid in a large network around the country. The resource becomes commonplace and it turns into a commodity. Nicholas predicts this will happen with enterprise IT departments in the near future.
In this recent interview, Tom Sullivan wanted to know how things have progressed in the last 5 years, and how new Web 2.0 technologies are bringing us closer to the point where IT becomes shared infrastructure. One of the biggest points made by Nicholas in this interview is the timeline of this transition. He says that this shift towards corporate cloud computing and shared resources is still a little ways off. There has been a lot of hype surrounding cloud computing lately, but not many companies are truly adopting it. There have been small advances in the corporate world, like Salesforce.com, but most centralized, cloud computing is done on a personal level at home. Corporate IT departments are resisting the change from in-house technologies and proprietary software simply because their jobs are on the line. Nicholas thinks that massive change in corporate IT is coming, but it is still 10-15 years down the road.
In this interview, Nicholas also mentions that the next generation of workers and managers have grown up with social networking and Web 2.0 technologies. It seems natural they will want the same types of tools for their office and corporate life when they get there. This will be a catalyst that should bring about sweeping changes in the IT world. He also makes an interesting point about how products like the Amazon Kindle are changing the world. The Kindle is always connected to the internet without any additional costs, it is just inherant to the device. More and more products will harness the unlimited power of the cloud in the future, which will help to reduce its image of a luxury tool and transform it into something essential in the business world.
To read this entire interview, click on over to it at ComputerWorld.
