Carr (Again) Predicts IT’s Demise

In 2004, Nicholas Carr created a few waves–drawing the ire of IT professionals and striking fear into the heart of CEOs and CFOs–when he wrote the book “Does IT Matter?” In it, he reasons that IT had become a commodity, offering companies little strategic advantage because as soon as one company adopts a new technology, its competitors do the same.

In 2008, Carr is back again with his new book, “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google,” this time predicting the demise of corporate IT departments, to be replaced by utility computing.

“In the long run, the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least in its familiar form. It will have little left to do once the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centers and into ‘the cloud,'” Carr writes.

Because individual employees will be able to the processing of information directly, they won’t need a legion of technical specialists to help them along–and this will impact businesses tremendously.

But what about the IT worker? Carr seems to recommend a move into information management and strategy.

“Over the next five or 10 years, the technical aspect of the IT department will become less important. It will slowly evaporate as more of those experts go outside onto the grid,” Carr told CIO Insight.

“But the information management and information strategy elements will become, if anything, more important. The ways companies take advantage of digitized information will become more important, not less.”