Last week I wrote about two criticisms of Nicholas Carr's Does IT Matter?: its overly Hobbesian view of businesses and networks, and its claim that IT has become infrastructure-- a forgettable commodity. In the first post, I made the case that information technology is still too difficult to use to be considered infrastructure: it remains difficult to deploy (at the level of individual users, but even more so at the enterprise level), and hard to use. In the second, I argued that Carr's criticism of networks was misplaced, and led him to overlook the strategic value that companies gain from networks.
Does IT Matter? also has a problematic notion of information technology. As Carr explains in the preface:
I use "IT" in what I believe is its commonly understood sense today, as denoting all the technology, both hardware and software, used to store, process, and transport information in digital form. It is important to stress that I am talking about the technology itself. The meaning of "IT" does not encompass the information the flows through the technology or the talent of the people using the technology. (xii)
Carr enforces this definition of "IT = hardware+ software" pretty strictly. Later in the book, for example, he notes that
Some commentators have argued that IT itself has never been the basis for competitive advantage-- that advantage comes not from the technology but only from "how you use it." But while such a claim could accurately be made about any business asset-- if a company does not know how to use the asset well, it is unlikely to gain an edge-- it is nevertheless misleading.... [D]istinctive information systems could and did provide the foundation for very strong and durable advantages during the buildout of the IT infrastructure. The systems themselves formed daunting barriers to competition. (76-77)
This definition of information technology as hardware and software, though, misunderstands technology.
Is it sufficient to think of information technology as just hardware and software? Historians and sociologists who study technology argue that no technology can be adequately understood in such discrete, formal terms. If you want to understand how technologies perform in the world-- and especially if you want to do something like understand the competitive advantages they can convey to users-- you have to see them as parts of larger systems or networks that include other technologies; legal and regulatory structures; economic or financial instruments; and even social and cultural institutions. (Some go even further, and argue that the distinctions that we usually make between technology, society, business, etc. don't reflect hard-and-fast categories, but rather are the products of these technological systems or networks.) What is true of technologies in general is especially true of information technologies, which are shaped by technical standards, the interplay of hardware and software, the actions and capabilities of users, and a variety of other forces.
Comments