Does IT matter?

Nicholas Carr of "IT Doesn't Matter" fame is out with his new book, "Does IT Matter?" I actually have a print column in the hopper (to be published on Friday at 3pm PT) that references Carr's book in passing as just another indicator of what I'm calling "IT fatigue." I'm currently reading the book and expect to comment on it in more detail in a later column. In the meantime, Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge site has posted an excerpt from Carr's new book. I think it's the duty of every CTO to read this book. Judging from the original essay and my progress through the new book so far, the title is a lot more provocative than the content. Bob Metcalfe was definitely right when he said that Carr "has succeeded in misleading the vast majority of Harvard Business Review readers who read only the titles," but I'm hoping some of those title-readers will eventually engage in an informed debate.

One issue that consistently rears its head in these discussions is IT commoditization, something I discussed just over a month ago in my InfoWorld column:

. . . . the idea that IT has been commoditized seems almost laughable. I would argue that, overall, IT commodification is a purely humorous proposition until IT project success rates consistently close in on 100 percent. As one CTO noted, despite the simplification of certain aspects of IT, it's still miles away from the point where setting up a content management or CRM system is as simple as setting up a kitchen appliance, despite what big vendor ads in the Wall Street Journal might suggest. Each IT environment is different, and the existence of cheap commodity servers and other hardware doesn't mean that IT strategy is any easier.

A CTO might assemble a complex system out of commodity parts, but the intelligence and technical insight that goes into building systems that serve business needs will never be a commodity. By the time a technical solution is commodified, the CTO has already moved on to the next difficult technical problem that has no commodity solution. That's what CTOs do: attack the tough problems. Until tough problems go out of fashion, the CTO will remain on the front lines of business.

After that column, I got an e-mail from Dr. Al Erisman (used with permission here), who said what I was trying to say more elegantly and concisely.

On the issue of commoditization, you rightly separated the commoditization of components and of systems. Today's systems may become tomorrow's components. So the march of commoditization is a very real thing. But...we never get to the end of this. Because the march to commoditization actually enables us to build things that in the past would have been far too difficult. Now, built from higher level parts, we can tackle what was once a dream. Those that believe the entire IT system will be commoditized just don't understand the challenge, and the business benefit, from putting together ever more integrated, strategic systems.

Beneath all the "IT doesn't matter" hype, there's the notion that IT is already a utility and you just plug things in and they work -- not true. In my mind, the ubiquity of IT shouldn't be confused with overall IT stability any more than the ubiquity of banking systems should be confused with making money. In both cases, good management matters more than anything.

All that being said, I think those IT proponents who enter the debate should definitely read Carr's book before getting into a red-faced rage because his view is more balanced than the title suggests. On page xiii of the preface, Carr says one thing that sticks in my mind throughout the book: "Indeed, as the strategic value of the technology fades, the skill with which it is used on a day-to-day basis may well become even more important to a company's success." I think a lot of IT people felt as if Carr's writing was a personal attack on their careers, but this one sentence tells me that regardless of whether servers and routers "matter," the skill needed to run those things isn't likely to go out of style any time soon.

(More to come as I finish the book.)