Nick Carr isn't always right - but ignore him at your peril
I'm obviously only a yellow-belt blogger. Reading
Dan Farber's post today over at ZDNet about reaction to Nick Carr’s presentation at
OSBC reminded me that I'd seen Nick Carr present almost exactly the same deck at Infoconomy's
Effective IT Summit in Cardiff, Wales a couple of weeks ago (where I was lucky enough to be invited as an "expert witness"… whatever that is ;-)) and had meant to blog on it after – but had entirely forgotten.
My reaction to seeing Nick then was the same as on reading
Steve O'Grady's and
Phil Wainewright's takes just now. I love reading Nick Carr's stuff. He’s really smart. He's not always right – but then who is?
At the Cardiff conference there was quite a prolonged Q&A after Nick's keynote talk. Lots of people (many of them representing vendors, but some IT directors too) received it pretty coldly, and didn’t hold back from saying that he was plain wrong. IT is completely different from electricity, they said – and yes, they're right - Phil Wainewright nails part of why Nick's thesis is a bit out of whack
here.
There's another reason that Nick is a bit off base, as I told him then (I managed to squeeze the last question in – and as any IT industry analyst will recognise, managed to state my opinion rather than asking a question ;-). It's that his view appears to be binary: you either "generate locally", or you "use a utility". The truth is that organisations can and should think about this question at a more granular level, focusing on business processes. Interestingly Nick himself kind of recognised this in his talk, by saying "increasingly, innovative organisations will make multiple sourcing decisions rather than one". The truth is that technology and business process maturity now mean that organisations aren’t best seen as "innovators", or "laggards" or whatever. They are a mixture of all of those. The key is to think about which parts of the organisation are about innovation – and to retain "local generation" in those parts; while moving towards a utility model of provision, as far as it can be attained, only in those parts which are naturally less needy of technology to drive competitive differentiation. Our
reports on BPM and SOA explore this in more detail.
The main point of this blog though is that however wrong you might think Nick Carr is, his ideas mustn't be ignored. Why? Because his views very neatly, in my experience, represent the thoughts and concerns of the businesspeople who pay every IT salary out there in industry. Nick has a business brain, speaks about commerce and economics, and resonates brilliantly with businesspeople. Many IT geeks distrust him. And there's the rub. Any IT professional who wants to improve the relationship between IT and business out there has to work out how to clearly articulate counter-arguments to Nick's thesis, rather than dismissing him. That's tantamount to saying "
users just don't get it".
