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OBSCURANTISM is a word that's no longer used these days. In the forties, it was a favorite of literary and social critics. The dictionary defined it as "a deprecation of or positive opposition to enlightenment or the spread of knowledge, especially a policy (as in art or science) of deliberately making obscure or withholding knowledge from the general public," also a "style (as in literature and art) characterized by haziness and lack of sharp definition." |
| Nick Carr made his name with the provocative Harvard Business Review article "IT Doesn't Matter" (free version here), its expansion into a less definitively titled book Does IT Matter? and his generally erudite blog. The charge of irrelevance hit the industry hard and elicited mostly incoherent and ineffective rebuttals (e.g. "hogwash"), which hampered real discussion of Carr's argument. |
| "Carr's vision is either utopian
or dystopian, depending on how you look at it, but either way, it mixes
a few likely trends with lots of naive wishful thinking, unsound logic,
and sophomoric shock value." Comment to The IT department is dead, NetworkWorld.com, 01/07/2008 |
Nicholas Carr's provocative HBR article published five years ago and subsequent books suffer from the lack of understanding of IT history, electrical transmission networks (which he uses as close historical analogy) and "in the cloud" software service provider model (SaaS). He cherry-picks historical facts to fit his needs instead of trying to describe real history of development of each of those three technologies. To be more correct Carr tortures facts to get them to fit his fantasy. The central idea of the article "IT does not matter" is simply a fallacy. At best Carr managed to ask a couple of interesting questions, but provided inferior and misleading answers. While Carr is definitely a gifted writer, ignorance of technology about which he is writing leads him to absurd conclusions which due to his lucid writing style looks quite plausible for non-specialists and as such influence public opinion about IT. Still as a writer Carr comes across as a guy who can write engagingly about a variety of topics including those about which he knows almost nothing. Here lies the danger as only specialists can sense that that "Something Is Deeply Amiss" while ordinary readers tend to believe his aura of credibility emanating from the "former editor of HBR" title.
Unfortunately the charge of irrelevance of IT made by Carr was perfectly in sync with the higher management desire to accelerate outsourcing and Carr's 2003 HBR paper served as a kind of "IT outsourcing manifesto". And the fact that many people were sitting between chairs as for the value of IT outsourcing partially explains why his initial HBR article, as weak and detached from reality as it was, generated less effective rebuttals then it should. This paper is an attempt to provide a more coherent analysis of the main components of Carr's fallacious vision five years after the event.
If one looks closer at what Carr propose, it is evident that this is a pretty reactionary and defeatist framework which I would call "IT obscurantism" and which is not that different from "creativism". Like with the latter, his justifications are extremely weak and consist of one hand of usage of fuzzy facts and questionable analogies, on the other putting forward radical, absurd recommendations ("Spend less", "Follow, don't lead", "Focus on vulnerabilities, not opportunities" and "move to utility-based 'in the cloud' computing") which can hurt anybody who trusts them or, worse, tries blindly adopt them. The irony of Carr's position is that for the last five year since the publication of his HBR article local datacenters actually flourished and until 2008 had shown no signs of impeding demise. In 2008 credit crush his data centers but they are just collateral damage of financial storm. From 2003 to 2008 Data Centers experienced just another technological reorganization which increased role of Intel computers in the datacenter (including appearance of blades, as alternatives to small to midrange servers and laptops as the alternative to desktop), virtualization, wireless technologies and distributed computing. Moreover there was some trend to the consolidation of datacenters within the large companies.
The paper contains critique of key aspects of Carr's utopia including but not limited to such typical for Carr's writings problems as "Frivolous treatment of IT history", "Limited understanding of enterprise IT", " "Idealization of 'in the cloud' computing model". and "Compete absence of discussion of competing technologies". The author argues that the level of hype about "utility computing" makes prudent treating all promoters of this interesting new technology, especially those who severely lack technical depth, with extreme skepticism. Junk science is and always was based on cherry-picked evidence which has carefully been selected or edited to support a pre-selected, absurd "truth". The article claims that Carr's doom-and-gloom predictions about IT and datacenters are based on cherry-picked evidence and while future is unpredictable by definition, the total switch to the "in the cloud" computing probably will never materialize.
Like a good Slashdot troll the slogan "IT does not matter" is catchy, provocative, and wrong. In his article "IT does not matter", published in the May 2003 edition of the Harvard Business Review Nikolas Carr (WOW, this guy somehow managed to get a huge Wikipedia entry !) declared that information technology inevitably going the way of the railroads, the telegraph and electricity networks.
He also claimed that local corporate datacenters will disappear and happy users connected to "in the cloud" service providers via Internet (software as a service) will take place of programmers and system administrators. IT departments as we know them now, in his view, are doomed. Carr predicts "utility computing" will displace corporate IT facilities in the early 21st century, just as companies stopped generating their own electricity in early 20th century. It appears that Carr shaped his initial article directly by difference and opposition, almost as though any tenet held by traditional IT had to be rejected and its opposite notion embraced. It is as though somehow the act of opposition itself gave validity to his views. In no way the latter it is true: his view were and remain completely detached from reality. As we will discuss later each and every of Carr's postulates definitely belong to pseudoscience. So his views naturally belong to the same category as astrology, UFOs, and creationism. Especially the latter.
His article as well as two subsequent books are perfect examples, almost masterpieces of incompetent, self-deluding, self-serving obscurantism applied to information technology. I am using the term "obscurantism" here in the meaning close to one of the meanings of the term provided by Wikipedia :
In the 19th and 20th centuries "obscurantism" became a polemical term accusing authors of writing in a deliberately vague and abstruse style in order to hide their vacuousness: the writer's ignorance is obscured.
Unfortunately Carr oversimplified and sensationalist hypothesis was rather uncritically met by mainstream press. since the publication of his HRB article he was regularly invited to say outrageous things in stylish phrases on IT conferences.
Now his proselytizing of "IT does not matter" fallacy has granted him something like the status of a household name. But why does this gentleman seem to attract, and repel, so many people? It may be the style of writings, as he is definitely a gifted writer, ably combining plausible nonsense about IT with an eye for the drama necessary for a big story. Or because he serves a useful for business role of an intellectual shock troop of the outsourcing movement.
This article is an attempt to analyze the main parts of his framework ( "(local) IT does not matter" and "Everything should be done via the cloud" ) and the recommendations which he provides ("Spend less", "Follow, don't lead", "Focus on vulnerabilities, not opportunities" and "move to utility-based "in the cloud" computing) five years after he published his HRB article. In way it is a late attempt to call a spade a spade and debunk propagated by Carr myths.
Carr pushes his hypothesis of evitable switch to utility computing (based on nothing but superficial analogy with railways, telegraph and electricity networks) in the following way:
It’s no surprise, given these characteristics, that IT’s evolution has closely mirrored that of earlier infrastructural technologies.
... ... ...
The arrival of the Internet has accelerated the commoditization of IT by providing a perfect delivery channel for generic applications. More and more, companies will fulfill their IT requirements simply by purchasing fee-based “Web services” from third parties – similar to the way they currently buy electric power or telecommunications services.
... ... ...
From a strategic standpoint, they became invisible; they no longer mattered. That is exactly what is happening to information technology today, and the implications for corporate IT management are profound.
He also formulated "New Rules for IT Management", no less, no more:
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. 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. In some cases, being on the cutting edge makes sense. But those cases are becoming rarer and rarer as IT capabilities become more homogenized.
- Focus on vulnerabilities, not opportunities. It's unusual for a company to gain a competitive advantage through the distinctive use of a mature infrastructural technology, but even a brief disruption in the availability of the technology can be devastating. As corporations continue to cede control over their IT applications and networks to vendors and other third parties, the threats they face will proliferate. They need to prepare themselves for technical glitches, outages, and security breaches, shifting their attention from opportunities to vulnerabilities
In all three key recommendations listed above are somewhat naive:
The key idea (actually a fallacy) of Carr's article and two books is absolutization of one of interesting (among several others) technical trend and arbitrary, not based on any competent analyses of the situation declaration that this trend is the future of IT. Being a gifted business writer, in case were Carr knows something about an industry, for example publishing , he usually comes out with some interesting and relevant observations (see, for example, his remarks about Wikipedia). But as for key IT topics, his alarming lack of competence is evident and no amount of writing skills (and again, he is a gifted writer; that fact cannot be denied) can disguise that. That's why he ends up confusing the reader (and probably himself). The problem with incompetent but active writers (graphomans) acquiring undue influence along with pseudo-guru status that is one of observations about Wikipedia made by Carr looks to me perfectly applicable to his own writing. As a result, as Carr correctly stated, "Small points get blown out of proportion - particularly those subject to debate - while big points get expressed poorly or glossed over."
Small points get blown out of proportion - particularly those subject to debate - while big points get expressed poorly or glossed over.
Carr outright dismissal of the relevance of local IT datacenters and waxing lyrical on "in the cloud" service providers (new utilities) is the worst type of primitive, incompetent IT Utopism. While "in the cloud" service providers represent one of several of important technical trends and are useful for certain cervices (especially for computationally intensive tasks and testing) they are not panacea from all IT ills. Moreover "in the cloud" software service providers (or WAN-based distributed computing in more technical terms), have a lot more problems than many people realize, especially when they're under the influence of vendors' cozy brochures or articles like Carr's.
Carr can approach IT only as a sociologist; he does not have real understanding of technologies involved and thus have a tendency of over-generation and misunderstanding of observed trends. He should stick to sociology, as he knows very little about IT. But unfortunately he discovered a gold mine as his musings can serve as a justification of outsourcing and he milked his initial controversy with two of his subsequent books and multiple appearances.
| Carr can approach IT only as a sociologist; he does not have real understanding of technologies involved. He should stick to sociology, as he knows very little about IT |
Due to the timing (end of dot-com bubble deflation) Carr oversimplified and sensationalist hypothesis became the fig leaf for justifying outsourcing. Carr himself soon became "traveling snake oil salesman" of sort. I think that the resurgence of religious fundamentalism and "IT does not matter" fallacy has common foundation -- modern culture (not necessary only American, despite a long tradition of anti-intellectualism in the country) devalues knowledge and rationalism. While junk-science and a celebrity-focused culture might be financed by defenders of status quo, with "IT denialism" the reality is more complex. Carr understood all too well that promoters of miracle diets (corporate IT diet in this case) do well in the current environment and he just could not resist the temptation to milk the cow (although judging from the level of discounting of used books both his subsequent books proved to be paperweights)...
Carr grossly undervalued complexity of IT and the value of IQ in IT. Without local IQ it is impossible to copy technological advances, so Carr's statement "the article argues is that we're at the point where any technological improvement in the management of information will be quickly and broadly copied, rendering it meaningless for competitive advantage" is both wrong and extremely misleading. For example Snort is an zero-cost (open source) IDS. But the way, for example, I implement Snort cannot be replicated by other companies which do not have specialist of my caliber and thus they are unable to replicate the comparative advantage, despite availability of technology (and plain vanilla implementation actually provides comparative disadvantage, not enhancing security but creating an illusion of security ;-). The same thinking can be applied to Tivoli, SAP/R3, Solaris and other complex products which require certification of specialists. Quoting a Microsoft executive: "the source of competitive advantage in business is what you do with the information that technology gives you access to." I would add that it also matters how you do it, what particular combination of technologies you use to achieve particular goals.
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Last modified: September 10, 2008