Sidebar: Reflections on Turbulent Times

Computerworld - The publication this week of the book Does IT Matter? caps a year in which Nicholas G. Carr has become the poster boy for IT cost cutting and the villain IT partisans love to hate. He talked with Kathleen Melymuka about what it all means.

So much has happened since we first talked about your piece that appeared in Harvard Business Review last year . What has surprised you most about the response? The size of it. I certainly didn't expect that it would come to define the terms of debate in the IT field. I knew I was saying some controversial things, but I had no idea it would strike such a nerve. The second thing that surprises me is the incredible diversity of opinions that have been voiced about my ideas. It shows that companies and IT suppliers are coming at IT decisions from a wide range of perspectives. There's no one reigning philosophy about how to approach IT in business.
How do you respond to people who say that your argument is not only wrong but also dangerous in that it can cause companies to miss critical opportunities? I think managers are intelligent people, fully capable of thinking about diverse ideas and figuring out the best way to apply them to their own business. The real danger is in trying to silence the debate. Even the parts of the debate that have been critical of my article seem to me to be altogether healthy and, in the end, constructive.
Which parts of your argument do you find resonate most with IT folks? The idea that more and more of the hardware and software that companies buy has been commoditized and really doesn't provide much opportunity for competitive advantage or isn't particularly strategic. I think in the past few years, a lot of companies have embedded that view into the way they approach buying and managing IT resources. The debate seems to focus on whether there is some small slice that is not commoditized.
In your debates with IT leaders, have any of their counterarguments caused you to revise your own thinking? Some of the counterarguments have caused me to deepen my own thinking, and I try to express that in the book. For example, there were comments that commoditization applies to hardware but not to software. I don't think that's true. I think we are seeing the commoditization of business software in a broad manner. Another useful question was whether ongoing advances in IT architecture provide abasis for competitive advantage. It's true that we have seen a dramatic evolution in architecture, but I would argue that all the trends are away from proprietary and toward open, shared, standardized architecture, and that erases the ability for companies to gain advantage.
If you were an IT leader, what would you be doing today? If I were a CIO now, I would be thinking of how to capitalize on commoditization. Market power is shifting from vendors to buyers, and today CIOs have a whole new range of options and considerably greater leverage to drive down costs. I'd be managing IT aggressively, but not entertaining outsized hopes that it will transform my business.