Alignment of it and Business

Alignment of IT and Business Strategy

Nicholas Carr is a former editor of the Harvard Business Review and made a second career for himself by releasing a controversial book titled Does IT Matter? Based on one of his final article written for the review. Since then he has been the iconoclast against technology and its rapid evolution over the Web and social networks. His blog post and article of most interest Is Google Making Us Stupid? (Carr, 2008) which paints an unflattering portrait of Web users as getting progressively less intelligent, more scattered in thought as a result.

Carr has found that bad news and fatalistic mindsets of change endear him quickly to the luddites of the technology arena who seek a leader to fight against progress. It is ironic that he consumes all these technologies readily and immerses himself in them, which is most evident in the Google article claiming using search engines can lead us to being more fragmented in focus and less intelligent (Carr, 2008). Carr is in many ways a technology hypocrite, relying on the same publishing platforms and technologies that propel him to fame and fortune to build a career as a poster-child luddite or resistor of change.

Google and search engines in fact is a tremendous source of knowledge and knowledge sharing, two aspects that lead to significant increases in personal and group productivity over time (Dyer, Nobeoka, 2000). The Toyota Production System (TPS) is a case in point that shows the sheer quality, velocity and seamless sharing of information can significantly increase the overall productivity of an entire corporation (Dyer, Nobeoka, 2000). Mr. Carr could have studied the aspects of how knowledge management, both tacit and explicit, can drastically improve the overall productivity and performance of people and organizations. Yet in his article and books he laments that since using Google he has trouble finishing a single page of text in a book and whines that he cannot finish reading a book as quickly as he had in the past. Apart from the many, many statistical inaccuracies in projecting only his own experiences on an entire generation of Web users globally, this symptom he laments about is actually a function of how many multiple tasks he has going at the same time. He is a quintessential multi-tasker with board memberships, a teaching responsibility and many other commitments. He complains that Google and search engines rob humanity over time of delving deep into a given subject, leading to "shallow learning and only surface-based comprehension" (Carr, 2008). This quite frankly sounds more like a personal epiphany than a scientific fact. Perhaps Mr. Carr needs to visit with members of the TPS and see how collaboration and speed of information flows creates a much greater level of productivity and transforms knowledge itself into the competitive advantage over price (Dyer, Nobeoka, 2000).

Conclusion