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Have we spent enough time criticizing Nicholas Carr?

Naw … we can squeeze at least one more column out of his Harvard Business Review article, “IT Doesn’t Matter.”

Carr, you’ll recall, asserts that information technology has become a commodity, and as such is now more of a defensive play than a strategic advantage. We’ve reached the point of diminishing returns, it’s become uninteresting … got the picture? It’s a message that’s simultaneously baloney and something lots of business executives will eat up with gusto, because it reinforces their deep-seated belief that IT is just a money pit filled with propeller-heads who use the company’s money to buy themselves toys.

Among the many well-thought-out rebuttals to Carr’s article is “IT Doesn’t Matter”: A Critical Analysis of Nicholas Carr’s I.T. Article in the Harvard Business Review, an upcoming book by Howard Smith and Peter Fingar which (ahem) quotes quite a bit of my recent KJR article on the subject. The key point, upon which Messrs. Smith, Fingar and I agree, is that unless how you do business doesn’t matter, IT has to matter since it’s built into every aspect of how you do business.

It is, of course, our own fault. As I pointed out in Bob Lewis’ IS Survival Guide (Macmillan/SAMS, 1999) we should never have placed our emphasis on information in the first place.

Not that information is a bad thing, you understand. It’s that information is the frosting, not the cake. The most important value “information technology” brings to most organizations isn’t the information, it’s process effectiveness. Want proof? Perform a gedankenexperiment. Turn off all of your company’s information technology and look at what forces you into bankruptcy: Your inability to do anything useful at a cost within two orders of magnitude of your most inept competitor will end your business’s sorry stay on this planet, long before anyone has a chance to notice a lack of information.

The devil is in the details (or maybe it’s God who lives there, as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe asserted. Or maybe both, which has fascinating theological ramifications not relevant here … but I digress.) Ahem. As I was saying, details matter. Our profession’s failure to understand that IT’s first priority is promoting efficient business processes has led to a staggering number of bad decisions, most of which are in the details where nobody ever sees them.

Nobody, that is, except everyone in the company who does real work. They live with the bad design decisions resulting from a focus on information instead of a focus on business process effectiveness. We call what they live with the “user interface.” We should call it “helping get important work done,” or maybe the “business process manager.” Then the user interface, which frequently ranks between “low priority” and “afterthought” in IT projects, would be elevated to where it belongs: The single most important factor in any IT project’s success.

Because there isn’t any such thing as an IT project in the first place. Projects are about business change — about how to make the business run better. With some exceptions (data warehousing projects, for example) the goal is to improve business effectiveness — to improve, that is, the efficiency of business processes and the impact of each employee.

So the next time someone charters an “IT project,” give it the right focus. Somewhere near the top, in the statement of objectives, make sure it says something like, “The purpose of this project is to optimize the company’s ability to xxx.

“And maybe, along the way, generate useful information, too.”

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

And now, a few disparaging words about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and especially the bills, passed by some states and under consideration in many more, to extend it — the so-called “DMCA 2” laws.

Yes, I’m incorporating a political perspective into this column, as I did a couple of weeks ago in the context of Oracle’s attempted acquisition of PeopleSoft. In response to those who encourage me to “leave politics out of it” … I didn’t put politics into IT in the first place. It’s there, and hard to ignore in situations like this.

The DMCA and DMCA 2 aren’t, at their core, liberal/conservative or Democrat vs Republican issues. They’re part of something more serious and pernicious: The increased influence of large corporations on the conduct of government, and correspondingly decreased influence of private citizens and small corporations.

Plenty of others have brought up DMCA 2, and I have nothing original to add to the discussion. If you haven’t paid attention, the claimed purpose of these laws is to make it even more difficult to pirate works of entertainment; the apparent purpose is to further restrict the rights of consumers to treat items they’ve purchased as something they actually own; and the reality of how they’re written would make firewalls and network address translation illegal.

Contact your state legislature and (if your company has them) lobbyists and tell them to kill this bad boy. While you’re at it, tell them to muzzle Orin Hatch and shoot dead his harebrained idea to let media companies remotely sabotage PCs they suspect contain pirated music. Talk about a great way to make the life of a CIO miserable …

The DMCA itself has less impact on working CIOs. Other than its linkage to the Windows XP end-user license agreement — the part that allows Microsoft to update your operating system without your knowledge or permission — there isn’t a lot in it that affects you as head of IT.

Except that it sets a bad example for CIOs. Why?

Think about what the DMCA does. In the long run, it will harm existing entertainment conglomerates more than it harms consumers, for two reasons. The first is that while the illegal duplication of music is a real issue, trying to counter advances in technology with legislation is, in the long run, self defeating. At some point existing entertainment companies will find themselves simply irrelevant, made obsolete by technologies they refused to embrace.

The bigger problem is the mis-match between what the recording industry wants to sell and what customers want to buy. The recording industry is selling CDs — physical collections sold in retail stores. Many of their customers want singles, and they want them downloadable. Even those who prefer to buy honestly have a hard time doing so.

There are a few new websites in this business. If they’re connected to the major labels or retailers, the connection is well-hidden. Regardless, I wish them well — they’re the right response to the problem. Buying legislative protection from Congress is the wrong one.

We’re in an age in which many businesses have extended their range of strategic options beyond winning in the marketplace. They pursue legislative and legal avenues rather than adapting their products and services to marketplace preferences and technological innovation, and they succeed. Their success has made them lazy.

Especially from advocates of “limited government,” as most large corporations are (or at least they are when the subject is paying for government), asking the government to protect them when they could be developing their own technology and strategies to protect themselves sounds pretty whiny to yours truly.

All of which may be interesting, but hardly an issue for IT departments. Except that it parallels similar, and similarly unhealthy trends found in far too many corporate environments.

The DMCA sounds to me a lot like the desktop lock-down policies advocated by many IT leaders. The music industry is trying to use legislation to prevent customers from getting what they want through other channels instead of finding a way to remain the supplier of choice. What is desktop lock-down? Many CIOs are either unable or unwilling to understand what end-users are trying to accomplish. Instead of finding ways to make working with IT preferable to bypassing it, they use the corporate policy manual … legislation … to prevent end-users from taking full advantage of information technology.

The music industry has told its customers, “We think you’re a bunch of thieves, so we’re combining legislation to increase the penalty for theft with technologies designed to prevent you from getting what you want.”

What are these CIOs saying to their end-users? The same thing: “We think you’re a bunch of corporate miscreants, so we’re combining policies that increase the penalty for misusing your PCs (with misuse being up to us to define) with technologies designed to prevent you from doing your job the way you think is best.”

The DMCA sets a bad example. Some CIOs have embraced it. Don’t be one of them.

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