• Foroohar, Rana. • October 2005 • October 6, 2005 • May 17, 2007 • August 23, 2007 • External links [ ] Wikiquote has quotations related to: Wikimedia Commons has media related to. • • • on • Carr, Nicholas (July 2008).. Retrieved 2008-07-09.

Two Trillion Reasons that I.T. Matters I asked how much IT matters of Frank Gens, senior vice president for the information technology market research giant IDC. (Full disclosure: IDC is owned by IDG, on whose board I serve.) IDC reports that the global investment in information technology (including telecommunications) totaled $1.9 trillion in 2003 and, despite Carr, will climb to $2.0 trillion in 2004. According to a 2003 IDC survey, non-IT business executives spend 20 percent of their time thinking about IT.

In the earliest phases of its buildout, however, an infrastructural technology can take the form of a proprietary technology. As long as access to the technology is restricted—through physical limitations, intellectual property rights, high costs, or a lack of standards—a company can use it to gain advantages over rivals. Consider the period between the construction of the first electric power stations, around 1880, and the wiring of the electric grid early in the twentieth century. Electricity remained a scarce resource during this time, and those manufacturers able to tap into it—by, for example, building their plants near generating stations—often gained an important edge.

On the other hand are specialists in “adoption management.” These are the people Carr wants demotivated, demoted, or fired. Carr argues that things that are widely available, like IT, cannot be used for sustained competitive advantage. Well, since Harvard Business Review is received by almost a quarter-million people and can be bought by anyone with $16.95, then according to Carr’s own argument, that publication itself doesn’t matter. Cancel your subscription and download any interesting articles from back issues-which any teenager will be able to find for you on the Internet for free.

Nicholas Carr, in his article “IT. IT doesn’t matter — Critique. Nicholas Carr. Be at businesses peril to ignore the opportunities that IT will create. Book Review: Nicholas Carr, “The Big Switch. After his first bestseller “Does IT Matter?” Nicholas Carr wrote another well written book. Carr tries to create. Buy as a PDF or create an account. Carr is the author of Does IT Matter? The End of Corporate Computing. Does IT matter? •A debate on the. –Nicholas Carr (2003) IT Doesn’t Matter. Harvard Business Review, May 42-52. – Create knowledge networks between people.

Railroad tracks, telegraph wires, power lines—all were laid or strung in a frenzy of activity (a frenzy so intense in the case of rail lines that it cost hundreds of laborers their lives). In the 30 years between 1846 and 1876, reports Eric Hobsbawm in The Age of Capital, the world’s total rail trackage increased from 17,424 kilometers to 309,641 kilometers. During this same period, total steamship tonnage also exploded, from 139,973 to 3,293,072 tons.

Studies show that the companies with the biggest IT investments rarely post the best financial results. As the commoditization of IT continues, the penalties for wasteful spending will only grow larger. It is getting much harder to achieve a competitive advantage through an IT investment, but it is getting much easier to put your business at a cost disadvantage. Follow, don’t lead.

Carr himself has a website, nicholasgcarr.com. IT apparently matters to Carr. Let’s face it: IT matters to everyone. Two Trillion Reasons that I.T. Matters I asked how much IT matters of Frank Gens, senior vice president for the information technology market research giant IDC.

Separate essential investments from discretionary, unnecessary, or counterproductive ones. Explore simpler and cheaper alternatives, and eliminate waste. Example: Businesses buy 100 million+ PCs annually—yet most workers use PCs for simple applications that require a fraction of their computing power. Start imposing hard limits on upgrade costs—rather than buying new computers and applications every time suppliers roll out new features. Negotiate contracts ensuring long-term usefulness of your PC investments. If vendors balk, explore cheaper solutions, including bare-bones network PCs.

Contents • • • • • • Career [ ] Nicholas Carr originally came to prominence with the 2003 article 'IT Doesn't Matter' and the 2004 book Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage (). In these widely discussed works, he argued that the strategic importance of in business has diminished as has become more commonplace, standardized and cheaper. His ideas roiled the information technology industry, spurring heated outcries from executives of,, and other leading technology companies, although the ideas got mixed responses from other commentators. In 2005, Carr published the controversial article 'The End of Corporate Computing' in the, in which he argued that in the future companies will purchase information technology as a utility service from outside suppliers. Carr's second book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, was published in January 2008.

And because it was proprietary to AHS, it effectively locked out competitors. For several years, in fact, AHS was the only distributor offering electronic ordering, a competitive advantage that led to years of superior financial results. From 1978 to 1983, AHS’s sales and profits rose at annual rates of 13% and 18%, respectively—well above industry averages. AHS gained a true competitive advantage by capitalizing on characteristics of infrastructural technologies that are common in the early stages of their buildouts, in particular their high cost and lack of standardization.

In 2002, the consulting firm Alinean compared the IT expenditures and the financial results of 7,500 large U.S. Companies and discovered that the top performers tended to be among the most tightfisted. The 25 companies that delivered the highest economic returns, for example, spent on average just 0.8% of their revenues on IT, while the typical company spent 3.7%. A recent study by Forrester Research showed, similarly, that the most lavish spenders on IT rarely post the best results. Even Oracle’s Larry Ellison, one of the great technology salesmen, admitted in a recent interview that “most companies spend too much [on IT] and get very little in return.” As the opportunities for IT-based advantage continue to narrow, the penalties for overspending will only grow.

Little has been said about the way the technologies influence, or fail to influence, competition at the firm level. Yet it is here that history offers some of its most important lessons to managers. A distinction needs to be made between proprietary technologies and what might be called infrastructural technologies. Proprietary technologies can be owned, actually or effectively, by a single company. A pharmaceutical firm, for example, may hold a patent on a particular compound that serves as the basis for a family of drugs.

Most of the major business-technology vendors, from Microsoft to IBM, are trying to position themselves as IT utilities, companies that will control the provision of a diverse range of business applications over what is now called, tellingly, “the grid.” Again, the upshot is ever greater homogenization of IT capabilities, as more companies replace customized applications with generic ones. (For more on the challenges facing IT companies, see the sidebar “What About the Vendors?”) What About the Vendors? Just a few months ago, at the 2003 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Bill Joy, the chief scientist and cofounder of Sun Microsystems, posed what for him must have been a painful question: “What if the reality is that people have already bought most of the stuff they want to own?” The people he was talking about are, of course, businesspeople, and the stuff is information technology. With the end of the great buildout of the commercial IT infrastructure apparently at hand, Joy’s question is one that all IT vendors should be asking themselves. There is good reason to believe that companies’ existing IT capabilities are largely sufficient for their needs and, hence, that the recent and widespread sluggishness in IT demand is as much a structural as a cyclical phenomenon.

Often, in fact, the best practices end up being built into the infrastructure itself; after electrification, for example, all new factories were constructed with many well-distributed power outlets. Both the technology and its modes of use become, in effect, commoditized. The only meaningful advantage most companies can hope to gain from an infrastructural technology after its buildout is a cost advantage—and even that tends to be very hard to sustain. That’s not to say that infrastructural technologies don’t continue to influence competition. They do, but their influence is felt at the macroeconomic level, not at the level of the individual company.

Look at Cisco and Wal-Mart and Dell -- they are innovative.' (Remember, this is 2003!) So, the real question is: Was Nicholas Carr right in 2003? Is he right today? It's time for a change! Fast forward to 2017. What has changed?

The winners will do very well; the losers will be gone. Finally, and for all the reasons already discussed, IT is subject to rapid price deflation.

(Michael Dell’s essential genius has always been his unsentimental trust in the commoditization of information technology.) And many of the major suppliers of corporate IT, including Microsoft, IBM, Sun, and Oracle, are battling to position themselves as dominant suppliers of “Web services”—to turn themselves, in effect, into utilities. This war for scale, combined with the continuing transformation of IT into a commodity, will lead to the further consolidation of many sectors of the IT industry.

That’s particularly true with data storage, which has come to account for more than half of many companies’ IT expenditures. The bulk of what’s being stored on corporate networks has little to do with making products or serving customers—it consists of employees’ saved e-mails and files, including terabytes of spam, MP3s, and video clips. Computerworld estimates that as much as 70% of the storage capacity of a typical Windows network is wasted—an enormous unnecessary expense. Restricting employees’ ability to save files indiscriminately and indefinitely may seem distasteful to many managers, but it can have a real impact on the bottom line. Now that IT has become the dominant capital expense for most businesses, there’s no excuse for waste and sloppiness. Given the rapid pace of technology’s advance, delaying IT investments can be another powerful way to cut costs—while also reducing a firm’s chance of being saddled with buggy or soon-to-be-obsolete technology.

Most have appointed chief information officers to their senior management teams, and many have hired strategy consulting firms to provide fresh ideas on how to leverage their IT investments for differentiation and advantage. Behind the change in thinking lies a simple assumption: that as IT’s potency and ubiquity have increased, so too has its strategic value. It’s a reasonable assumption, even an intuitive one. But it’s mistaken. What makes a resource truly strategic—what gives it the capacity to be the basis for a sustained competitive advantage—is not ubiquity but scarcity. You only gain an edge over rivals by having or doing something that they can’t have or do.

When Gordon Moore made his famously prescient assertion that the density of circuits on a computer chip would double every two years, he was making a prediction about the coming explosion in processing power. But he was also making a prediction about the coming free fall in the price of computer functionality. The cost of processing power has dropped relentlessly, from $480 per million instructions per second (MIPS) in 1978 to $50 per MIPS in 1985 to $4 per MIPS in 1995, a trend that continues unabated. Similar declines have occurred in the cost of data storage and transmission.

(Michael Dell’s essential genius has always been his unsentimental trust in the commoditization of information technology.) And many of the major suppliers of corporate IT, including Microsoft, IBM, Sun, and Oracle, are battling to position themselves as dominant suppliers of “Web services”—to turn themselves, in effect, into utilities. This war for scale, combined with the continuing transformation of IT into a commodity, will lead to the further consolidation of many sectors of the IT industry. The winners will do very well; the losers will be gone. Finally, and for all the reasons already discussed, IT is subject to rapid price deflation.

By now, the core functions of IT—data storage, data processing, and data transport—have become available and affordable to all. 1 Their very power and presence have begun to transform them from potentially strategic resources into commodity factors of production. They are becoming costs of doing business that must be paid by all but provide distinction to none. IT is best seen as the latest in a series of broadly adopted technologies that have reshaped industry over the past two centuries—from the steam engine and the railroad to the telegraph and the telephone to the electric generator and the internal combustion engine.

Borwap jepang suster pemerkosaan obat perangsang. Accessible within “My Library” upon purchase. Hardcopy, paperback, softbound, magazine: Physical copy shipped from our warehouse to your requested shipping location. PDF: PDF digital file. Accessible within “My Library” upon purchase. Bundle: A themed collection containing two or more items at a special savings.

As the commoditization of IT continues, the penalties for wasteful spending will only grow larger. It is getting much harder to achieve a competitive advantage through an IT investment, but it is getting much easier to put your business at a cost disadvantage. Follow, don’t lead. Moore’s Law guarantees that the longer you wait to make an IT purchase, the more you’ll get for your money. And waiting will decrease your risk of buying something technologically flawed or doomed to rapid obsolescence. In some cases, being on the cutting edge makes sense.

On the other hand are specialists in “adoption management.” These are the people Carr wants demotivated, demoted, or fired. Carr argues that things that are widely available, like IT, cannot be used for sustained competitive advantage. Well, since Harvard Business Review is received by almost a quarter-million people and can be bought by anyone with $16.95, then according to Carr’s own argument, that publication itself doesn’t matter.

Best practices are now quickly built into software or otherwise replicated. And as for IT-spurred industry transformations, most of the ones that are going to happen have likely already happened or are in the process of happening. Industries and markets will continue to evolve, of course, and some will undergo fundamental changes—the future of the music business, for example, continues to be in doubt. But history shows that the power of an infrastructural technology to transform industries always diminishes as its buildout nears completion. While no one can say precisely when the buildout of an infrastructural technology has concluded, there are many signs that the IT buildout is much closer to its end than its beginning.

Discussing various examples ranging from 's typewriter to drivers', Carr shows how newly introduced technologies change the way people think, act and live. The book focuses on the detrimental influence of the Internet—although it does recognize its beneficial aspects—by investigating how has contributed to the fragmentation of knowledge.

Spanning historical, technical, economic, and philosophical viewpoints, the book has been widely acclaimed by reviewers, with the terming it 'essential.' In 2016, Carr published ', a collection of blog posts, essays, and reviews from 2005 to 2016. The book provides a critique of modern American techno-utopianism, which magazine said 'punches a hole in Silicon Valley cultural hubris.'

But those cases are becoming rarer and rarer as IT capabilities become more homogenized. Focus on vulnerabilities, not opportunities. It’s unusual for a company to gain a competitive advantage through the distinctive use of a mature infrastructural technology, but even a brief disruption in the availability of the technology can be devastating.

All of which reveal a deficit of security measures and a poor contextual understanding of the technology. These and other IT-related problems aren’t rooted in technology but in leadership failings. The people in the C-suite don’t understand IT problems, don’t provide adequate resources to solve them, and don’t approach the issues as members of unified technology-literate teams. To address these shortcomings, companies can take action in three areas: • Literacy. The senior leadership needs to become literate in technology. IT isn’t somebody else’s job, it’s ultimately theirs.