gonzobuzz-ing » Nick Carr http://www.gonzobuzz.com/blog Pondering the Social Web from a Small Business perspective Fri, 23 Apr 2010 01:33:37 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Carr bids adieu to the IT department http://www.gonzobuzz.com/blog/2008/02/20/carr-bids-adieu-to-the-it-department/ http://www.gonzobuzz.com/blog/2008/02/20/carr-bids-adieu-to-the-it-department/#comments Wed, 20 Feb 2008 01:01:44 +0000 john http://www.gonzobuzz.com/blog/2008/02/20/carr-bids-adieu-to-the-it-department/ Nicholas Carr first gained notoriety within the corporate IT world in 2003 with his provocative Harvard Business Review article “IT Doesn’t Matter”. In the article, Carr argued that companies could no longer gain any strategic advantage from IT investments as its ubiquity had made IT simply another cost of doing business.Carr is now back with another book that is sure to raise the hackles of corporate IT types yet again.

In “The Big Switch“, Carr compares the trend toward grid or cloud computing with the development of the electric grid more than a century ago.Carr agues that much in the same way that stand-alone electric dynamos disappeared with the rise of national power grids, today’s islands of corporate IT resources will be made irrelevant with the shift to utility computing. And as the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centres into the cloud, the traditional IT department is set to go the way of the Dodo.Carr does make a compelling argument for the ascendency of utility computing and he is certainly quite right about the general trend lines – witness the rapid rise of on-demand and software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions as well as web services from the likes of Amazon, Savvis, Salesforce.com and Google. However, I think it will be quite some time before most enterprises will fully embrace the utility computing model & completely abandon their internal IT resources.

In the small business arena however, cloud computing is set to make a more immediate impact. The vast majority of small businesses do not have internal IT departments with vested interests to protect.

Innovative on-demand services and emerging web technologies are making it possible for small businesses to deploy powerful IT tools and processes that were previously limited to large enterprises with deep pockets.This shift to cloud computing is set to create vast new opportunities for agile small businesses and is a topic you will be reading a lot more of in this blog.

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