Ernie the Attorney (tangentially) takes on Nicholas Carr, author of Does IT Matter? Access Ernie's 10 May posting here. Access ZDNet interview with author Nicholas Carr here. Access Carr's website here.
In the initial shot heard round the world, last year Carr published the essay "IT Doesn't Matter" in which he "argued that while IT was necessary for business survival, it no longer provided any strategic advantages. IT, like electricity, had become a simple factor of production--and should be managed as such." (ZDNet) Apparently, one or two people took issue with that POV ... ZDNet reports that "HP CEO Carly Fiorina called Carr 'dead wrong' while Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer dismissed his essay as 'hogwash.'" OK ... no self-interest there ....
We think this is a sound bite battle in which people are talking past each other. We deconstruct Carr as saying nothing more than that the barriers to technological replication are now sufficiently low ($, time) that, for most businesses, technology cannot (in and of itself) confer a sustainable competitive advantage. Given the rate of change in technology, it's difficult to argue with that viewpoint; alternatively, if you remove the word "sustainable," you might just have the basis for a donnybrook.
The problem with stuff like this is that, when it gets abstracted to sound-bites, people who have not bothered to read the book glom onto the sound-bites to reinforce their prejudices.
At the end of the day, we share Ernie's fears ... we can see legal luddites that are being dragged kicking and screaming into a more modern practice of law, seizing on the Carr sound bite and feeling much better about still running Windows 95 office-wide, talking into a steno pad, or not bothering to understand EDD.
Notwithstanding. The end-game is not technology. Technology is both a strategic and tactical tool-set to help fashion strategies and executions that bear mightily on the end-game. Early-adopters using proven new tools stand a pretty good chance of eating luddites for breakfast ... all other things being equal (which they seldom are).
In respect of certain stages of incubating a new business, we've been known to say "You don't have to be right ... you just can't be wrong." This is not dissimilar -- technology applied to law is not a silver bullet ... but it is a bullet; and, if you plan to be waging war, you probably don't want to go into battle carrying rocks against an opponent sporting a machine gun.
As the axiom goes ... the stone age did not end because we ran out of rocks ...
The B side of the Joe Jones 45 You Talk Too Much was You've Got the Right String, But the Wrong Yo-Yo ... which is where we come out on this controversy.
Comments ... Does Does IT Matter? Matter?
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