趣味英语招生海报:《IT不再重要》这篇文章

Description:
This widely debated article now includes 14 Letters to the Editor. As information technology has grown in power and ubiquity, companies have come to view it as evermore critical to their success; their heavy spending on hardware and software clearly reflects that assumption. Chief executives routinely talk about information technology's strategic value, about how they can use IT to gain a competitive edge. But scarcity, not ubiquity, makes a business resource truly strategic--and allows companies to use it for a sustained competitive advantage. You gain an edge over rivals only by doing something that they can't. IT is the latest in a series of broadly adopted technologies--think of the railroad or the electric generator--that have reshaped industry over the past two centuries. For a brief time, these technologies created powerful opportunities for forward-looking companies. But as their availability increased and their costs decreased, they became commodity inputs. From a strategic standpoint, they no longer mattered. That's exactly what's happening to IT, and the implications are profound. In this article, HBR's Editor-at-Large Nicholas Carr suggests that IT management should, frankly, become boring. It should focus on reducing risks, not increasing opportunities. For example, companies need to pay more attention to ensuring network and data security. Even more important, they need to manage IT costs more aggressively. IT may not help you gain a strategic advantage, but it could easily put you at a cost disadvantage.

Subjects Covered:
Competitive advantage, Cost analysis, Information technology, Return on investment, Risk assessment, Strategic planning.

"From the start, the World Wide Web has been a vessel of quasi-religious longing. And why not? For those seeking to transcend the physical world, the Web presents a readymade Promised Land. On the Internet, we're all bodiless, symbols speaking to symbols in symbols. The early texts of Web metaphysics, many written by thinkers associated with or influenced by the post-60s New Age movement, are rich with a sense of impending spiritual release; they describe the passage into the cyber world as a process of personal and communal unshackling, a journey that frees us from traditional constraints on our intelligence, our communities, our meager physical selves. We become free-floating netizens in a more enlightened, almost angelic, realm."

来源如下：自己看吧，要尽快，不然时间久了网页会失效的。
http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/
http://searchcio.techtarget.com/qna/0,289202,sid19_gci1009939,00.html
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reviews:
IT Doesn't Matter? Business Processes Do
Has IT has reached the Winter of its life as an enabler of competitive advantage? Or is it Springtime, the season of growth for forward-thinking companies?

From the authors of the business bestseller Business Process Management: The Third Wave, read Howard Smith and Peter Fingar's critical analysis of Nicholas Carr's IT article in the Harvard Business Review.

"Smith and Fingar present a provocative summary of today's debate over whether IT has become a sunset industry" -- Leslie Walker, Washington Post, Sunday, August 17, 2003; Page F03

"Howard Smith and Peter Fingar ... argue that Carr is not only wrong but dangerous. They remind us of what happened when Harvard Business Review published Michael Hammer’s 1990 article “Reengineering Work.” Too many Harvard MBAs decided to take the easy part of Hammer’s advice and downsized their companies to death. Unless Carr’s argument is debunked, the current crop of reigning MBAs will be tempted to run WordPerfect on mid-1980s PCs connected to IBM 360 mainframes." -- Robert M. Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com, from his article "IT Matters", MIT Technology Review, June 2004

Other reviews:

Library Journal
Smith (chief technology officer, Computer Sciences Corp.) and consultant and educator Fingar are both heavily involved in the IT field, notably in the area of business process management. They have written a vigorous rebuttal to Nicholas Carr's provocative article about the commodification of the IT industry, which was published in the May 2003 issue of the Harvard Business Review and drew some notable rebuttals from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other sources. Instead of proclaiming the death of IT, the authors see a new age dawning of business process management (BPM). They dispute the idea that in many ways IT has become a utility and assert that business processes are taking over where data processing has left off. ... a spirited commentary on a controversial subject and a strong defense of the importance of the IT industry.

Transform Bookshelf
In this response to Nicholas Carr's Harvard Business Review article, "IT Doesn't Matter," the authors make the case for IT mattering. For example, they describe the benefits that large companies like GE and Cisco Systems are achieving through their investments in IT. For those who didn't see Carr's controversial article, the crux of his argument is that IT follows a pattern strikingly similar to earlier technologies like railroads and electric power. For a brief period, as they are being built into the infrastructure of commerce, these "infrastructural technologies" open opportunities for forward-looking companies to gain sustainable competitive advantages. But as the availability of these technologies increases and their cost decreases — as they become ubiquitous — they become commodity inputs; they no longer matter. Smith and Fingar write that "although Carr's article embodies several individual truths, his assumptions, premises and conclusions all merit closer examination if, as in the Indian story of the Blind Men and the Elephant, the whole picture of IT and business strategy are to come into focus." The authors refute specific points in Carr's article, providing a more hopeful view of IT and its future potential, particularly the promise of business process management. A highly readable examination with interesting examples and quotes.

EDUCAUSE
This book is an important read for higher education leaders as they sort through the hype, rhetoric and promises of competitive advantages in the midst of addressing 21st century challenges in higher education.

Infoconomy
Smith believes that Carr's arguments fly in the face of common sense ... In his critique of Carr, Smith takes up both of these points, particularly focusing on the fact that modern and emerging information systems will put more power, and not less, in the hands of managers who will then be able to innovate without enormous risk and costs.