Irving Wladawsky-Berger

“IT Doesn’t Matter” Ten Years Later

How quickly time passes. . .  It’s already been ten years since the publication of Nicholas Carr’s controversial article IT Doesn’t Matter.  The article appeared in the May 2003 issue of the Harvard Business Review, where Carr was then an editor-at-large.  CIO Magazine marked the 10th anniversary with an interview with Carr and a retrospective story on the reactions to the article by Ann Bednarz, who wrote: 

“The jarring headline of Carr’s May 2003 article, IT Doesn’t Matter, is what many people remember, and it tends to overshadow his more thought-provoking thesis: that companies have overestimated the strategic value of IT, which is becoming ubiquitous and therefore diminishing as a source of competitive differentiation.”  His claims that companies were overspending on IT, because the technology was becoming more commoditized and accessible to everyone “ignited an industry firestorm.” 

In the interview, Carr said that the reaction to the article went way beyond what he expected.  IT vendors were up in arms, because he was essentially telling their customers that the competitive advantage gained by IT investments was shrinking once everyone had access to the same technologies, and that they therefore did not need to be spending much money on the latest hardware and software products.  CIOs and IT analysts had a more mixed reaction, with some disagreeing with Carr’s points, while others saying that they made a lot of sense.

Traditional Data Analysis and Data Science

I recently participated in an industry panel on Redefining BI & Analytics in the Cloud at a conference in New York.  Among other questions, moderator Michael Hickins, - a senior editor at the Wall Street Journal and editor of its online CIO Journal, - asked the panel to discuss the difference between the business intelligence and analytics approaches of the past twenty years and the emerging discipline of data science. 

In my opinion, data science should be viewed as a multidisciplinary evolution from business intelligence and analytics.  In addition to having a solid foundation in statistics, math, data engineering and computer science, data scientists must also have expertise in some particular industry or business domain, so they can properly identify the important problems to solve in a given area and the kinds of answers one should be looking for.  Domain expertise is also needed to be able to draw the proper conclusions from their analysis, and to communicate their findings to business leaders in their own terms. 

The emergence of data science is closely intertwined with the explosive growth of big data over the past several years.  Institutions are now wrestling with information coming at them in volumes and varieties never encountered before.  In addition to their multidisciplinary skills, data scientists bring increased breadth and depth to the analysis of these different sources of information compared to traditional analyst roles, as described in this short article in IBM’s website, So what does a data scientist do?: 

“Whereas a traditional data analyst may look only at data from a single source - a CRM system, for example - a data scientist will most likely explore and examine data from multiple disparate sources.  The data scientist will sift through all incoming data with the goal of discovering a previously hidden insight, which in turn can provide a competitive advantage or address a pressing business problem.  A data scientist does not simply collect and report on data, but also looks at it from many angles, determines what it means, then recommends ways to apply the data.”

The New Center for Global Enterprise

In April of 2006, IBM’s then CEO Sam Palmisano outlined his vision for the 21st century global corporation in an article published in Foreign Affairs, - The Globally Integrated Enterprise.    The transformation of IBM into one of the world’s leading global enterprises is among Palmisano’s biggest accomplishments during his tenure as IBM’s CEO, from January of 2002 to December of 2011.  He has continued to pursue his interest on the subject over the past year by organizing the Center for Global Enterprise (CGE).  The CGE is a private, nonprofit research institution devoted to the study of the contemporary corporation, globalization, economic trends, and their impact on society.  It was recently launched with Chris Caine - former head of IBM’s global public policy programs, - as its president.

Today, most everyone agrees that globalization, - along with the emerging digital age with which it’s closely intertwined, - is transforming just about all aspects of economies and societies around the world.  While globalization has been with us for a long time, we are still learning how to deal with its implications in its present, Internet-driven incarnation. 

Globalization was beginning to gather steam in the early to mid-2000’s as business was recovering from the aftermath of the dot-com bubble.  Broadband Internet was becoming ubiquitous and interconnecting countries around the world, helped along by all the fiber optic cables that communications providers went deeply into debt to lay out during the bubble.  The world was waking up to the growing economic power of emerging markets and the BRICs in particular, especially with the publication of The World is Flat in April of 2005, Tom Friedman’s best-seller that did so much to explain the transformative powers of globalization and digital technologies.  This was the environment around the time that Palmisano’s Foreign Affairs article came out. 

Some Early Lessons from the Boston Marathon Bombing Investigation

On April 22, CIO Journal deputy editor Steve Rosenbush published a column on the Boston Marathon bombing investigation.  His column looked at the way a number of disparate elements quickly came together to address the very complex problem at hand: identify and find those responsible for the bombing as quickly as possible.

I’ve worked closely with Steve since last April when CIO Journal started posting my blogs.  We discussed the Boston investigation as he was writing his column and he quoted some of my comments.  Since then, I’ve continued to think about what might be some of the key lessons we have learned so far about the investigation and the way it was conducted.  Let me share a few of my personal first impressions.