Nuance is dead. May it rest in peace.
The headline: “PC shipments crater and tablets are the bogeymen,” (Woody Leonhard, InfoWorld, 10/10/2013).
First, let me assure you, Woody is a bright guy and I have a lot of respect for him. And second, writers don’t always write their own headlines. In any event, here’s what “crater” means: Worldwide, PC shipments are down around 8 percent, depending whose numbers you believe. In the U.S. PC shipments are up … up … a couple of percent.
Hardly the stuff of cratering.
The more interesting factoids in the story (and as I work for Dell I’m not an entirely disinterested party, although I have no connection to the product side of the company): The major manufacturers (HP, Lenovo, Dell) saw slight growth in their sales worldwide. Lenovo and Toshiba saw double-digit growth in the U.S. Yes, that’s right, growth … also not the stuff of cratering.
An interesting sidelight is that Apple’s U.S. sales took a sizable hit (more than 10%).
The truly fascinating bit was that Acer and Asus saw their sales plummet — down around 25% from last year. That really is cratering.
How to interpret these numbers? It’s probably much as pointed out here a few weeks back (“The post-PC era isn’t post-PC. It’s PC plus,” 9/16/2013). What cratered was consumer demand for PCs. Acer, Asus, and even Apple have a strong consumer orientation. Enterprise demand is, most likely, stable — enough from new ventures and replacement units to continue to support the major manufacturers.
It isn’t as attention-getting as “crater,” though.
As long as I’m quibbling with my friends at InfoWorld I might as well take issue with another recent piece they ran: “The end of the CIO as we know it — and IT feels fine,” (Galen Gruman, 10/11/2013). I’m afraid it got a lot wrong, starting with when the CIO title first appeared and what drove it. It wasn’t, as the article claimed, 15 years ago, driven by Y2K combined with the rise of ERP and eCommerce.
As evidence … why would any of those change “Director of Electronic Data Processing” to “Chief Information Officer”?
No, the CIO title came into existence twice that long ago, in the early 1980s. The driver: A newly introduced technology for mainframe computers called the database management system.
DBMS licenses were expensive. Very expensive in the context of what companies were already spending on their mainframe systems. The real, tangible cost-justification for spending the additional money was that it increased programmer productivity. Which it did. (Disagree? Imagine having to program without one.)
Except that, as anyone who’s tried it knows, programmer productivity is excruciatingly hard to measure, which means proving the tangible benefits of the new technology would have been excruciatingly hard.
So IBM’s marketing department came up with a new concept: The primary value EDP provided wasn’t increased employee productivity, as we’d been claiming until then. That was secondary. The big value was the information itself and what companies could do with it to improve decision-making. What, you thought this was new with data warehouses, data mining, and big data?
Whether you agree or disagree with the concept, the title “Chief Information Officer” flowed directly out of this idea — that information is where the big value is.
The concept’s legitimacy is questionable, by the way. Among its drawbacks: It elevates the importance of management decision-making above the value of actual work. But that’s a different, and very long diatribe.
Anyway, Galen’s piece is one of many that are appearing these days that predict we’ve entered the end-times for the CIO, and probably for corporate IT as well. Read any of these pieces. Squint at them sideways and you can predict the outcome of following this advice: A proliferation of “islands of automation,” because when companies push IT into business departments, nobody will be willing to pay for integration, let alone have the skills to handle it, let alone the authority.
And, the advice-followers will see significant fortification of political siloes. The reason? A big chunk of spending that used to be strategic (or at least enterprise in scope) will now be tactical, or, more accurately, departmental.
Siloed.
For a very long time … since, in fact, the advent of the DBMS … IT’s most important role has been integration. Maybe if CIO had stood for “Chief Integration Officer” we wouldn’t need to have this little chat.
* * *
Speaking of the 9/16 column, which talked about how IT’s role is expanding while its budget isn’t, I’m embarrassed. At the end I promised a follow-up that talked about what CIOs can do to survive the experience. But my vacation distracted me. Sorry. Next week for sure.
– Bob
What you just said about the post PC era is what I have been saying too. Problem: if you are not correct, then what I am doing is not seeking advice, but seeking a “co-conspirator”. Chuckle: never thought you’d get it for being right and having folks agree with you! There is no dignity!
“It elevates the importance of management decision-making above the value of actual work.”
Wow – can we hear that diatribe? That really hit me and stuck for some reason.
-Rick
“It elevates the importance of management decision-making above the value of actual work.”
But we obviously do believe that management has more value than real work. Look at how much more money managers make than “workers” make!
I read that piece by Galen here yesterday, and I was just itching to hear your commentary. Getting so tired of seeing this stuff everywhere, and people are actually mesmerized by it – I work for some of these people! It’s as if they’ve all heard from the oracle and IT really isn’t that complicated after all! Thanks for setting it straight Bob.
PS – please do post diatribe regarding management decision making vs. value of extra work.
Full disclosure: I’m a corporate IT guy and make a nice living doing it, so that makes me a highly interested party to this debate, but anyway ….
The things that corporate IT does are (1) difficult to do, requiring substantial specialized knowledge and expertise, and (2) the business is always clamoring for more of what corporate IT does. So unless both those factors change, which I do not see happening any time soon, corporate IT will remain as a vital supporting fuction in the enterprise.
Hi Bob,
Interesting article. Understanding the origins of the CIO with DBMS systems also largely explains the technology blinkers that too many CIOs wear. “Integration” and “Information” are two sides of the same coin, anyway; you can’t operate a left hand and right hand as an integrated unit without the information flows to co-ordinate them.
However, I think you are side-stepping one important issue: what if the costs of operating in silos is less than the costs of trying to co-ordinate a monolithic set of systems?
I’m reminded of Ronald Coase and his economic work on transaction costs: a firm only grows bigger while the costs of co-ordinating the larger operation are less than the costs of outsourcing a function through the marketplace.
The internet is rather unique in that it has benefited both sides of the equation: it made it more cost-effective to manage large organisations *and* it decreased the transactional costs of having someone else provide a system (ie SaaS).
Unfortunately, the costs of integrating IT systems through a centralised IT function haven’t decreased. If anything, they have increased because the 90s and 2000s produced deep, data-level integration instead of what should have been a loosely-coupled, process-oriented process. And these days IT is spending an awful lot of time trying to either unpick that legacy, or worse entrench it further.
I always thought the CIO title was phony. Saying there’s a “Chief” Information Officer implies there are other information officers.
Are there? There may be some AVP’s on the next line of the org chart, but does anyone ever talk about “the CIO and all the other information officers”?
The CIO title seems to be mostly marketing and image, rather than substance.