Harvard Flunks IT

Computerworld - Harvard Business School has many successful graduates (our CEO in chief, George W. Bush, to name but one) and a proud history of IT scholarship. But I fear that the time has finally come to stick a fork in it as far as thought leadership in IT is concerned. All of us in the profession have, at least once during our careers, bowed reverentially to capitalism's Mecca on the Charles as we sought to merge the historically different and often nonconvergent disciplines of technology and business management. No more.
Nicholas G. Carr, writing in the latest issue of the school's highly influential publication, the Harvard Business Review, has penned a neo-Luddite, could-have-been-written-by-the-Unabomber (another Harvard guy) antitechnology article, "IT Doesn't Matter." It pretty much tells IT leaders that they should pack their bags and go home. As I read the article, barely a sentence went by without me gasping.
We are told that IT is no longer strategic, that the now-and-forevermore infrastructure is pretty much built out, that vendors are "rushing to position themselves as commodity suppliers" and that we should no longer "seek advantage aggressively" but instead should "manage costs and risks meticulously." The article makes Bill Joy's "technology will destroy the world" speech look upbeat.
He is dead wrong on all counts. Of more concern, however, is the sad fact that many weak-minded, vision-challenged business executives will use this as ammunition to further reduce the influence and impact that appropriately managed IT can have.
An oft-lobbed criticism against Harvard Business School is that it gets the past perfectly and is pretty close to correct on the present but still manages to flunk the future. This may have something to do with its fetishlike obsession with the case study method, which by its very nature is an exercise in historical analysis.
What Carr doesn't seem to understand is that the future is all about the evolution and blurring of the interface between people and our machines. The environment we will live, work and play in will become inexorably more digital. The Darwinistic forces of information natural selection are just now beginning to exert themselves. Our aptitude for information management will determine much of our lives. "Being digital" is the next step in the evolution of our species. Whether our endpoint is Digital Eden or High-tech Hades is very much up to us.
Carr overfocuses on the current pre-Edenic environment, a time when machines are just machines -- relatively simplistic, nonintelligent chunks of metal and silicon. When they break, we arescrewed. When they work, we are victimized; pagers, for example, are little more than electronic leashes. But in Digital Eden -- a place we will never see if we follow Carr's advice -- the machines will work for us.
In closing, let me paraphrase yet another Harvard guy. Bobby Kennedy was defining youth, but I will apply it to IT: "IT is not a menial task waiting to be outsourced, but a state of mind, a temper of will, a quality of imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease."
IT does matter.
Thornton May is a longtime industry observer, management consultant and commentator. Contact him at thorntonamay@aol.com.

Read more about Management and Careers in Computerworld's Management and Careers Topic Center.