In addition to the heavy operational focus of most IT shops, new compliance requirements are added to IT shops already heavily burdened with a plethora of audits. Politically, in 2003, we are reeling from recent events. Our first presidential election of the new millennium took six weeks to decide because of the method used by Florida to collect simple data ('). The headlines in Europe call it a real 'Mickey Mouse' operation. Less than two years prior, 9/11 had caused us all to question everything. Even the long-vaunted FBI had been caught with its IT computing pants down. The nation's top cops, famed for their ability to gather and sift through huge volumes of information, are exposed as laggards in 2001, dependent on outdated systems that do not have a prayer of keeping up with the exponentially increasing demand.

1. Does It Matter Pdf

Does It Matter Pdf

In this article, HBR's Editor-at-Large Nicholas Carr suggests that IT management should, frankly, become boring. It should focus on reducing risks, not increasing opportunities. For example, companies need to pay more attention to.

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. An industrial manufacturer may discover an innovative way to employ a process technology that competitors find hard to replicate.

For a brief time, these technologies created powerful opportunities for forward-looking companies. But as their availability increased and their costs decreased, they became commodity inputs.

Now that IT is ubiquitous, however, we must focus on its risks more than its potential strategic advantages. Consider electricity. No company builds its strategy on its electrical usage—but even a brief lapse in supply can be devastating.

In the summer of 2008, published Carr's article ' as the cover story of its annual Ideas issue. Highly critical of the Internet's effect on cognition, the article has been read and debated widely in both the media and the. Carr's main argument is that the Internet may have detrimental effects on cognition that diminish the capacity for concentration and contemplation. Carr's 2010 book,, develops this argument further.

Today, that has changed completely. Chief executives now routinely talk about the strategic value of information technology, about how they can use IT to gain a competitive edge, about the “digitization” of their business models. 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.

Carr urges this as if it were breaking news. In fact, IDG alone publishes 300 information technology magazines worldwide, and each has several competitors. All of these have been offering advice for decades on just how far onto the bleeding edge of technology it is wise to go to give your company an edge.

Even more important, they need to manage IT costs more aggressively. IT may not help you gain a strategic advantage, but it could easily put you at a cost disadvantage. When you place your first order on HBR.org and enter your credit card information and shipping address, 'Speed-Pay' ordering is enabled. 'Speed-Pay' is a service that saves the credit card details from your most recent purchase and allows you to re-use that card for future purchases. If you click the Speed-Pay button on any product detail page, your order will be charged to the most recent credit card information attached to your account and shipped (if applicable) to the last address we have on file for you. Ebook: A digital book provided in three formats (PDF, ePub, and Mobi) for the price of one. Accessible within “My Library” upon purchase.

Others, like Reuters with its 1970s financial information network or, more recently, eBay with its Internet auctions, had superior insight into the way IT would fundamentally change an industry and were able to stake out commanding positions. In a few cases, the dominance companies gained through IT innovation conferred additional advantages, such as scale economies and brand recognition, that have proved more durable than the original technological edge.

IT is, first of all, a transport mechanism—it carries digital information just as railroads carry goods and power grids carry electricity. And like any transport mechanism, it is far more valuable when shared than when used in isolation. The history of IT in business has been a history of increased interconnectivity and interoperability, from mainframe time-sharing to minicomputer-based local area networks to broader Ethernet networks and on to the Internet. Each stage in that progression has involved greater standardization of the technology and, at least recently, greater homogenization of its functionality. For most business applications today, the benefits of customization would be overwhelmed by the costs of isolation. IT is also highly replicable.

In the dozen years from 1989 to 2001, the number of host computers connected to the Internet grew from 80,000 to more than 125 million. Over the last ten years, the number of sites on the World Wide Web has grown from zero to nearly 40 million. And since the 1980s, more than 280 million miles of fiber-optic cable have been installed—enough, as BusinessWeek recently noted, to “circle the earth 11,320 times.” (See the exhibit “The Sprint to Commoditization.”). The Sprint to Commoditization As with earlier infrastructural technologies, IT provided forward-looking companies many opportunities for competitive advantage early in its buildout, when it could still be “owned” like a proprietary technology.

Here, too, a company that sees what’s coming can gain a step on myopic rivals. In the mid-1800s, when America started to lay down rail lines in earnest, it was already possible to transport goods over long distances—hundreds of steamships plied the country’s rivers. Businessmen probably assumed that rail transport would essentially follow the steamship model, with some incremental enhancements. In fact, the greater speed, capacity, and reach of the railroads fundamentally changed the structure of American industry.

Consider electricity. No company builds its strategy on its electrical usage—but even a brief lapse in supply can be devastating. Today, an IT disruption can prove equally paralyzing to your company’s ability to make products, deliver services, and satisfy customers. But the greatest IT risk is overspending—putting your company at a cost disadvantage. Make IT management boring.

Similar declines have occurred in the cost of data storage and transmission. The rapidly increasing affordability of IT functionality has not only democratized the computer revolution, it has destroyed one of the most important potential barriers to competitors. Even the most cutting-edge IT capabilities quickly become available to all.

But there is an unsung player in our marvelous innovation machine: the aggressive users of information technology. In Germany, by contrast, it’s hard to buy IT unless it’s from Siemens. In the United States, startups readily find managers out on the cutting edge, searching for new, smarter, and more efficient ways to do things-a quest that keeps our vaunted innovation machine humming. If business executives follow Carr’s advice, who will provide innovation’s test beds? How will new technologies find their markets? This may be the most important reason to debunk Carr’s arguments once and for all: if they harden into conventional business wisdom, American ingenuity will be strangled in its bassinet.

Even more important, they need to manage IT costs more aggressively. IT may not help you gain a strategic advantage, but it could easily put you at a cost disadvantage. When you place your first order on HBR.org and enter your credit card information and shipping address, 'Speed-Pay' ordering is enabled. 'Speed-Pay' is a service that saves the credit card details from your most recent purchase and allows you to re-use that card for future purchases. If you click the Speed-Pay button on any product detail page, your order will be charged to the most recent credit card information attached to your account and shipped (if applicable) to the last address we have on file for you. Ebook: A digital book provided in three formats (PDF, ePub, and Mobi) for the price of one. Accessible within “My Library” upon purchase. Tamil bible app for laptop windows 7.

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. The telegraph system spread even more swiftly.

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. 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.

But the greatest IT risk is overspending—putting your company at a cost disadvantage. Make IT management boring. Instead of aggressively seeking an edge through IT, manage IT’s costs and risks with a frugal hand and pragmatic eye—despite any renewed hype about its strategic value.

It is a 3 or 4 digit number appearing on the front or back of your credit card. See examples below. Visa and Mastercard The security code has 3 digits and appears on the BACK of the card in the signature panel. American Express The Card Identification Number (CID/4DBC) is a four-digit, non-embossed (flat) number that is printed on every American Express Card. The CID/4DBC is ALWAYS located ABOVE the embossed (raised) account number on the face of the card.

It’s going into embedded systems-the eight billion microprocessors shipped every year that don’t go into PCs. New Ethernet standards are being created, new commoditization races are being started, and Ethernet, if ever it wasn’t, is once again a tool of corporate strategy. In the article and now again in his book, Carr wrongly equates today’s information technologies with electricity, and then he wrongly characterizes electricity as static.

The mid-nineteenth-century boom in railroads (and the closely related technologies of the steam engine and the telegraph) helped produce not only widespread industrial overcapacity but a surge in productivity. The combination set the stage for two solid decades of deflation. Although worldwide economic production continued to grow strongly between the mid-1870s and the mid-1890s, prices collapsed—in England, the dominant economic power of the time, price levels dropped 40%. In turn, business profits evaporated. Companies watched the value of their products erode while they were in the very process of making them.

(See the sidebar “New Rules for IT Management.”) New Rules for IT Management. With the opportunities for gaining strategic advantage from information technology rapidly disappearing, many companies will want to take a hard look at how they invest in IT and manage their systems. As a starting point, here are three guidelines for the future: Spend less.

When we search the Web, for instance, the context of information can be easily ignored. 'We don't see the trees,' Carr writes. 'We see twigs and leaves.' One of Carr's major points is that the change caused by the Internet involves the physical restructuring of the human brain, which he explains using the neuroscientific notion of '.' In addition to being a Pulitzer Prize nominee, the book appeared on the nonfiction bestseller list and has been translated into 17 languages in addition to English. In January 2008 Carr became a member of the Editorial Board of Advisors of. Earlier in his career, Carr served as executive editor of the.

Steve Ballmer called it hogwash,. All the vendors were really up in arms,' Carr says.

These links should be described clearly in the annual report so that analysts can scrutinize them. The senior leadership group mustn’t just pay lip service to the CIO and his or her team. The CIO’s group is at the core of the business; it runs the company’s nervous system (ERP) and immune system (security) and connects all internal and external entities. Technology updates should be provided to the senior management team with the same frequency and rigor as financial statements and signed off on by the leadership team as part of the pay-for-performance framework. It’s true, in a sense, that enterprise computing is like a utility. Data flows through every company like water, gas, and electricity.