Non-IT ideas good for small businesses

Nicholas Carr now says IT should merge into business units.

By James E. Gaskin, Network World, 01/24/08

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IT Bad Boy Nicholas Carr, who's book "IT Doesn't Matter" enraged big company technology folks to no end a few years ago, is back again. This time, he says The IT Department Is Dead in his book "The Big Switch." But you may already be using the exact model he says will appear in the future.

Of course, if you're a small business without a “proper” IT department, this may seem funny. You're actually the envy of Carr in some ways, since business decisions drive every technology purchase and process. He's worried that when you get larger, you'll flip that around and let technology dictate the business processes, like the big companies do.

Carr predicts IT people will either merge into business groups within their company or disappear. This will happen because big companies will give up their huge data centers and trust all their business department technology needs to Software-as-a-Service applications and on-demand storage hosted somewhere online. No data center, no need for an IT department. The “cloud” will become your data center.

Yeah, and pigs will fly. Coordinating data between departments using the same data center takes far too much time and effort now, and spreading that data out across the Internet will complicate the process another tenfold. But the idea that IT people should be inside and support specific business departments makes a huge amount of sense. So much common sense, in fact, very few big businesses do it that way today.

Carr's holy grail for this diatribe seems to be Google. Companies will switch their data processing efforts from their own data centers to Google-like data centers, much like Thomas Edison's centralized power stations convinced businesses to stop generating their own electricity and trust the power company.

Good luck with that, Nick. My take away from all this vitriol is the disbanding of IT as a separate and sacrosanct department and the distribution of technical employees to the business units. This makes great sense as a model for small and growing companies, but won't work with existing big companies.

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