Contents

Dangerous Articles 15
The IT World According to Carr 17
Carr is Right-In a Wrong Kind of Way 19

Nine Issues 24
1. Industrial-Age versus Information-Age Technology 25
2. The IT Industry versus The Business Use of IT 26
3. Infrastructural Technologies 27
4. The First Fifty Years of Business and IT 30
5. Applications Versus Business Process Management 31
6. Grids, Web Services and Computing Utilities 34
7. The Essence of Web Services 37
8. Best-Practice and Best-in-Class Business Processes 42
9. The IT Buildout 46

IT's Power is Not Outstripping Business Needs 47
When the Price of IT Functionality Drops, That's a Good Thing 49
The Universal Distribution Network Hasn't Caught Up With Demand 51
The World Wants Commodity IT Suppliers 51
The Dot-Com Bubble Has Burst-So What? 52

A Closer Look at The Last Fifty Years of IT 57
Beyond Data, On To Process Digitization 61

A Deeper Look at Commoditization Trends in IT 67
1. There is no single commodity 67
2. Today's commodity was yesterday's innovation 69
3. Core versus context, mission-critical versus support 71
4. Value from outsourcing 72

The Invisible "P" in IT Matters 74
Beyond Data Processing, On To BPM 78
The Process is the Product 82
Beyond the IT Shop, On To The Process Office 84
The New Value in "IT of a Different Kind" 86
A Catharsis of Sorts for the IT Industry 90

An Epilog to Data 95

Rebutting the Rebuttals and Alternative Futures 97

What Should Companies Do? 100
The 90-Day Plan 106
First month: From innocence to awareness 107
Second month: From apprentice to practitioner 107
Third month: Epiphany 108
The Fifty-Year Plan 108

Postscript on the Economy 109

Appendix: A Recap of the Early Rebuttals Appearing in the Press 115
Paul Strassmann 115
ComputerWorld 116
Fortune Magazine 117
CNN/Money 118
InformationWeek 118
Computerworld 119
EETimes 120
USA Today 121
Gartner 121
John Hagel 121
Infoworld 123

References 124