Does IT matter conference

Here goes (more cov­er­age at it.fdih.net, dalager.com, akav.dk):

Wel­come by Claus Hjort­ing, FDIH. Carr him­self is late and will be arriv­ing in 10 min­utes. “It is fair to say we don’t fully agree that IT doesn’t matter”.

First speaker, Thomas Honoré. Intro about IBM’s busi­ness. Ini­tial state­ment: IT itself might not be strate­gic, what we want to accom­plish, how­ever, is. Is the bridge to Swe­den strate­gic? Is IT-strategies non­sense? Don’t look at IT iso­lated, always keep focus on the end goal.

Thomas Hon­ore is now ques­tion­ing the audi­ence about the use of IT in their com­pa­nies. Point being, noone find them­selves say­ing they don’t use and value IT heav­ily. Then goes on to list top ten CEO trends of 2004, all based on IT, sim­ply mak­ing IT nesse­cary. (thomashonore.mov)

Pow­er­point goes black. Makes bad joke on the impor­tance of IT.

Good advice: Being con­ser­v­a­tive can be ok — but stay­ing pas­sive is death; there’s still an inter­net rev­o­lu­tion going on out there. (touchy sub­ject, I guess, the ‘rev­o­lu­tion’ part indi­rectly sug­gests that money are to be made just by stay­ing ahead…).

Next speaker is Mogens Kühn Ped­er­sen, ques­tion­ing some of Carr’s key points. Are the infra­struc­ture metaphor meaningful?

(Side­note: If you’re lucky enough to under­stand Dan­ish, read the other live-bloggers’ more thor­ough cov­er­age — I’ll just keep mum­bling in English…)

IT.…or IS. Infor­ma­tion sys­tems mat­ter. (mogenskpedersen.mov)

(Until this point, dif­fer­ent — but obvi­ous — responses to Carr’s orig­i­nal claim have been pre­sented. I can’t imag­ine any­one dis­agree with IT at least being more of a com­mod­ity; whether the exact ini­tial catchy phrase “IT doesn’t mat­ter” is true or not isn’t all that inter­est­ing — but what does all this mean for soft­ware devel­op­ment, for the strate­gies them­selves etc. Hope­fully this will be answered later dur­ing the discussion…)

Carr is on. Jokes about, that — after lis­ten­ing to Kühn — he didn’t real­ize his argu­ments were so com­plex. First slide: “IT is essen­tial to business…but is it essen­tial to busi­ness strategy.

Shows dia­gram with cross­ing ubiq­uity / advan­tage lines. Wide­spread tech­nol­ogy equals less advan­tage potiential.

(Live-blogging isn’t com­pletely live nor thor­ough; the new ecto crashes once in a while and con­vert­ing lit­tle movies with bad sound into huge mon­sters of Quicktime-movies take time as well.…)

Carr goes through some exam­ples, adding details, not exactly clam­ing that “IT doesn’t matter”.

So what:

• Spend less (not get less, do less — just have bias towards spend­ing less on IT). Google and other indus­try lead­ers already buy more com­mod­ity products.
• More should fol­low, not lead. It’s cheaper — you can’t be sure that the sys­tem you buy will end up as the stan­dard. Exam­ple, bank­ing: Pro­pri­etary bank-owned online bank­ing sys­tems with no com­pet­i­tive advan­tage as online bank­ing quickly became a must-have ser­vice offered by sev­eral vendors.
• Inno­vate when risks are low. Wal­mart man­aged to use their mar­ket posi­tion to get RFID tech­nol­ogy implemented.
• Focus more on vul­nara­bil­i­ties than oppor­tu­ni­ties. Don’t be cre­ative, be good.

Carr is done. Before dis­cus­sion, Myg­dal will intro­duce our lit­tle micro media thingie.

All speak­ers are on the floor for debate, Mogens Kühn starts off by ques­tion­ing Carr’s ter­mi­nol­ogy. Dis­cus­sion is mostly about pro­duc­tiv­ity; increase in pro­duc­tiv­ity due to IT invest­ments will be shared, increas­ing pro­duc­tiv­ity of the whole indus­try — not being an advan­tage of a sin­gle com­pany. (nicholascarr.mov)

Thomas Honoré is asked what he feels about Carr’s advice to invest less in IT. He, not sur­pris­ingly, doesn’t like that at all. He insists on being part of an indus­try, a com­mu­nity — pro­vid­ing advice to his customers.

Carr answers another ques­tion from Kühn (which states that Easy­jet and other mod­ern air­lines get their advan­tage by com­bin­ing IT with new busi­ness strate­gies — which to me seems to be Carr’s point exactly) by com­par­ing two bak­ers with a pound of flour each. One makes a good loaf of bread, the other a bad one — that doesn’t make flour a strate­gic input, it doens’t mean that we should invest more money in flour or be on the cut­ting edge of flour tech­nol­ogy. Carrs laughs, stat­ing that to him Kühn and him seems to agree — Kühn just won’t admit it. (some­one does the flour power joke.…)

Tim­ing ques­tion from the audi­ence: Com­pa­nies can’t wait for­ever, isn’t it just as risky sit­ting back wait­ing? Carr answers that of course you shouldn’t wait for­ever, but you shouldn’t be cut­ting edge either — it doens’t pay off. Kühn adds that some com­pa­nies might still want the pos­si­ble strate­gic advan­tage of a cus­tom solu­tion. IBM (Honoré) is asked if they help their cus­tomers to fol­low or to lead. Honoré answers that most of their cus­tomers see them­selves as lead­ing, but when asked if he thinks they are actu­ally lead­ing or not, he slides off, say­ing he can’t see the rel­e­vance of the ques­tion, that he shouldn’t decide that on behalf of his cus­tomers. Laugh­ter from the room…

Ques­tion from the audi­ence on align­ing strate­gies with sys­tem. Carr replies, that hope­fully that shouldn’t be too rel­e­vant as all sys­tems should be aligned with the strat­egy of a com­pany. But that doesn’t mean that all invest­ments are strategic.