Why business and IT needs a middle-man...

Having just had to sit an exam on Information Systems as part of my Executive MBA, we were studying the original article by Nicholas Carr in 2003 "Does IT matter?" which then had a response from Cisco's  Brad Boston saying, more or less, "Well...duh!?!"

I have to say, coming to the debate seven years later, that I agree with Boston's 'Duh'.  Porter spoke about a similar subject in 2001 when he discussed "Strategy and the Internet" and suggested that the internet simply reduced margins (through cutting costs) thanks to lower barriers to entry, ease of access between customers and suppliers (avoiding middlemen) and, at the time, ridiculous business models that meant companies such as Buy.com were selling goods below the cost of manufacturing them to try and gain market share.

First of all, a caveat: apologies to anyone if their thoughts are misrepresented here.

But in short, I would be curious to know Carr and Porter's opinions now.

With the mass user collaboration and 'Value Constellations' (as Normann and Ramirez put it) where everyone creates value and everyone gets value...surely the possibilities for competitive advantage are huge? One just needs to find one's niche ('do what you do best' as Jim Collins would have it) or be truly innovative...which is easier all the time with the new possibilities the technologies provide.

Remember that Kurzweil's 'Law of Accelerating Returns' which was written at the time of Porter's article and before Carr's, states that we will see the equivalent of 10,000 years' of innovation in the 21st century compared to what happened in the 20th century.  With such innovation, where changes happen quicker than ever, what is more relevant now is that any organisation that does not seek to innovate and does not embrace the potential of information technology (in all its forms - it isn't just email, internet and word processing) is really missing the boat.

The challenge, of course, is that there are so many organisations, and people, who still do not understand (much less use) social media and all that that can provide, that when then next level of tools come along, whatever they might be, those people will be left further and further behind. The digital divide is growing. It isn't necessarily income based, but there is a level of education involved. People need to be educated on the potential of IS&T.

In a business context this should be the role of a CIO, but many organisations don't have such a role. The IT Directors, talking from a technical standpoint, talk to the business. The business says 'we need X' and the IT Directors go away and make it to that specification...rather than having a dialogue, saying 'if you do X...would you like Y as well? It's easy to do at the same time?'  or 'X will take us 8 months and a lot of money, but we can do X-1 really easily within a week or so'.

This, I believe, is the fundamental reason IT has a bad reputation in so many organisations and why big projects don't deliver.  There is no one in the middle negotiating between business needs and requirements and what is possible.

Well there is, but I'm a little busy right now...