All power tends to corrupt.(Does IT Matter?: Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage)(Book review)

Byline: Kim Thomas

All power tends to corrupt

' book review

In his book Does IT Matter?, Nicholas Carr controversially argued that the vast amount of money spent by enterprises on IT has failed to lead to competitive advantage. In The Big Switch, he returns to the changing role played by IT in the modern business, and makes some stark and uncomfortable predictions about the direction in which developments in technology are taking us.

In the first part of the book, Carr offers a potted history of the electricity industry. In it he shows how an entrepreneur called Samuel Insull revolutionised the industry by building central generators serving a wide area to replace the individual generators built by manufacturers to provide electricity for their factories.

While this brought huge efficiency benefits to industry, it also had some less benign consequences, says Carr: electrical appliances such as washing machines and vacuum cleaners, for example, effectively trapped women in the role of homemakers.

The analogy with IT is clear, says Carr. One day, the supply of computing services, like the supply of electrical power, will be a utility business. Organisations will no longer operate datacentres and run expensive software; ...