I recently read an article that is probably one of the most thought provocative pieces written about IT in recent years. It is titled is “IT Doesn’t Matter” written by Nicolas Carr and can be found here. As you can guess from the title it lays out a strong argument that as IT becomes more ubiquitous, it becomes less of a competitive advantage and more of a risk factor for organizations.
I found myself taking issues with many of the points in the article, as I think Mr. Carr intended the readers to do just that. One key issue I had is with the view of IT as a single transport layer responsible for processing, storing and transporting information. IT is more complex and multi layered than that, as I am sure most of the readers of this blog will agree.
My biggest issue with the article is coming from my personal experience, having worked with IT organizations of Fortune 2000 companies for the past 8 years, I’ve seen clear evidence that the implementation of IT, and how integrated IT is with the business, is a source for competitive advantage for organizations.
One example I would like to focus on in this post is the performance behind IT services. Performance is a good example to how un-ubiquitous IT still is. The attitude towards performance and the implementation of performance best practices varies from one organization to another and sometimes even between departments within the same organization. I have worked with a big Boston based bank in which performance is treated as a product, where every transaction has clear SLAs in the few second range and performance is an integral part of the product requirement specification. On the other side of the spectrum, I have also worked with companies where performance is that thing you take care of when end users complain. Needless to say that the performance oriented bank is still (even in these times) a very successful enterprise while some of the performance lacking organizations that I mentioned are no longer in business.
One implication of the paper that I do agree with is that more and more IT services will be delivered as web services and hosted in the Cloud. Again in this scenario, performance is not only critical, but can also be the source of competitive advantage, if all software based business processes are going to become commodities as the paper suggests, then the speed at which these services are delivered is going to be a key differentiator between one service provider (let’s say SAP for example ) to another (Salesforce.com as another example).
Performance can also provide cost saving advantages as improvements are made to response time, server scalability and processing efficiencies, the same infrastructure can support more users, increasing the [number of supported users]/[dollars spent] ratio.
I would like to hear about examples you have about competitive advantages delivered through IT and specifically from implementing a performance engineering process? Do you agree with Carr that IT doesn’t matter?
Amichai
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