By annie shum | March 25, 2009
Whether you prefer the term “utility computing” or “the cloud,” the industry is headed in that direction, however slowly, and the transition will have a multifaceted impact on IT in some ways productive, others unpleasant. And it will strike to the heart of the very technology professionals who provide a significant chunk of what is today’s enterprise IT.
Nicholas Carr, author of the tech-contentious Harvard Business Review article “IT Doesn’t Matter” and, more recently a book “The Big Switch,” spoke with Tom Sullivan about how enterprises will transition to a more utility-like model for IT, why a small cadre of companies is gobbling up 20 percent of the world’s servers and the unheard of possibilities that creates, how Web 2.0 replicates business fundamentals, as well the human factor in all of this.
InfoWorld: There are those who would say that The Big Switch is something of a shift away from your position in “IT Doesn’t Matter.” Is that true?
Nick Carr: Even as far back as my original HBR article ” IT Doesn’t Matter,” one of the basic arguments was that more and more of the IT that companies are investing in and running themselves looks a lot like infrastructure that doesn’t give you a competitive advantage. I even made an analogy with a utility that everybody has to use but becomes over time pretty much a shared infrastructure. And so what happens when most of what companies use is indistinguishable for what their competitors use? Doesn’t that mean we’ll move toward more a shared infrastructure, more of a utility system?
The rise of cloud computing in general reflects the fact that a whole lot of the IT that companies have been investing in is really better run centrally and shared by a bunch of companies than it is maintained individually. Now, having said that, I see it as a logical next step from “IT Doesn’t Matter.” On the other hand, you could say that if a company is smarter in how it takes advantage of this new technological phenomenon, it might at least get a cost advantage over its competitors. So at that level, you can say there’s some tension between the idea that you can’t get an advantage from technology and what we’re seeing now with cloud computing.
InfoWorld: A shift toward IT as a utility will be long-term. It’s happening in really small ways, such as Salesforce.com, but in the here-and-now, not a lot is going on. So do you have a timeline for this?
Nick Carr: It’s a 10- to 15-year period of transition. Particularly if you look at large companies, big enterprise users, that’s probably about the right timeframe. They have huge scale in their internal operations, and it’s going to take quite some time for the utility infrastructure to get big enough and efficient enough to provide an alternative to big private datacenters. I completely agree that we’re in a transition period that’s going to take some time. And I’d say at this moment that the hype about cloud computing has gotten a bit ahead of the reality. Still, the uptake of cloud services over the last year has moved faster than I would have expected. So there is a lot going on, but there’s still a long way to go.
InfoWorld: Vivek Kundra, the new federal CIO, has said that the personal technologies he uses are so much better than what he was using professionally that he just had to adopt things like YouTube for the D.C. city government…
Nick Carr: Quite a while ago, I was interviewing Marc Benioff about the origins of Salesforce.com and he had a very similar story. He was working at Oracle at the time but using things like Amazon.com online. And he said, “This is really powerful and I can do all sorts of customized stuff with it. Why can’t I do this with enterprise applications?” In the story he tells, that was the inspiration for Salesforce. You can relate to that because when you compare most corporate applications to what you find a-dime-a-dozen of online, computing is much easier through the services you get online everyday than it is going through your traditional corporate applications.
InfoWorld: One last question for you. What is the most significant thing enterprise IT shops should brace themselves for?
Nick Carr: The big thing they’ll have to brace themselves for is that the functions that until now have accounted for most of their spending and most of their hiring are going to go away, such as all the administrative and maintenance jobs that were required to run complex equipment and applications on-site. This isn’t going to happen overnight, but much of that is going to move out to the utility model over time. That doesn’t mean IT shops won’t continue to exist and have important functions — they might have even have some more important functions — but it does mean that their traditional roles are going to change and they’re going to have to get used to, I think, having a lot fewer people and probably having considerably lower budgets. Again, I’m talking about change that will play out in 10 years, not change that’s going to happen in two years.
Tom Sullivan (InfoWorld) 26/03/2009
Topics: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Media, Improving Workforce Efficiency & Reducing IT Barriers | No Comments »
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