Clouds & storms: Nicholas G. Carr on cloud computing

Working for a frozen water company must have seemed like a sensible career move in New England during the 1850s. During the age of steam, America's ice traders carved 10 million tons of the stuff out of local rivers and lakes every year. They kept it cool in specially constructed icehouses, wrapped it in hay and then exported it around the world.

In London, during the mid-1800s, no elite dinner party was complete without a sparkling mountain of ice cut from Wenham Lake in Massachusetts. Frozen water from New England also found its way to destinations as diverse as Martinique, India and Singapore. With it came recipes for ice cream and cocktails dreamed up by promoters to generate demand.

In the end, it was the electricity generators that killed off this thriving business. Equipped with fridges, householders began to make their own ice. By 1920, the frozen water trade had all but disappeared in North America. This story of this mighty industry that melted away crops up in Nick Carr's latest book, The Big Switch.

According to Carr, cloud computing threatens the traditional IT department just as surely as electricity generation once threatened the ice traders. In retrospect, he argues, today's IT departments will come to be viewed as an evolutionary dead-end -- a temporary aberration necessitated by client-server computing but wiped out by The Cloud, which is emerging as the dominant mode for corporate computing.

If that argument sounds familiar, that's because it refines the thesis that Carr first propounded five years ago in a paper for the Harvard Business Review called "IT Doesn't Matter". In that article and in the subsequent book, Carr lunged aggressively at the shibboleths worshipped by IT professionals and at the industry that generates US$2 trillion in revenues annually by selling hardware, software, services and bandwidth.

IT, Carr proposed, had become a mere cost of doing business. Increasingly commoditized, it was "essential to competition" but "inconsequential to strategy".

Carr argued that CEOs needed to aggressively restrict the ambitions of IT departments. As for CIOs, he pleaded that their "ultimate professional goal" should be to "render themselves obsolete".

This would happen, he said, once the infrastructure of IT became "so stable and robust, so taken for granted, that it no longer requires active high-level management".

Five years after the great howl of outrage cause by Carr's first book, re-reading it is interesting. But trawling through its index is positively fascinating.

Open-source software, for example, merits a relatively heavyweight six mentions (it's a small index). But if you follow up each of the references, it becomes clear that Carr regarded the phenomenon as peripheral at the time.

Google ("operator of the leading internet search engine") receives just two, very brief, mentions. Between them, the words "cloud", "grid" and "utility" appear above the parapet just once.

Five years ago, Carr was describing The Cloud as a "utopian" prospect that must overcome "many technical barriers". It's a measure of how much times have changed, rather than a criticism of the author, that The Cloud now receives star billing in The Big Switch.

Change for the better

Just as interesting is the accompanying change in the way Carr thinks about IT departments. Yes, Carr still thinks that the IT department is "unlikely to survive, at least not in its current form".

But the form that IT departments will assume after the switch to cloud computing seems a lot more exciting to Carr now than it did five years ago. Back then, Carr was described as chucking "the rhetorical equivalent of a 50-megaton smart bomb" at corporate IT. Today, the terms of debate are more complex and more subtle.

Speaking on the telephone, Nick Carr sounds slightly hesitant.

I ask him whether his view of IT managers has changed during the past five years. Perhaps, I suggest, he has spent so much time speaking at CIO conferences that he has fallen victim to Stockholm Syndrome -- the psychological condition in which kidnap victims start to identify with their abductors.

Carr laughs, and then answers: "Hard to say. I don't think so."

So does he still get invited to conferences to say nasty things about IT managers?

There's a lengthy pause at the other end of the line.

"Er, yes," Carr replies.

He elaborates: "It's not so much saying terrible things about IT managers as challenging IT managers on some of the assumptions they hold about what they do.

"I have no problem being the designated irritant or a provocateur if it can lead to some self-questioning.

"In some ways, what I'm most proud of is fostering a debate that hadn't really happened up to that point."

Carr remains a popular speaker. In June 2008 alone, he was scheduled to appear at four conferences -- in New York, Orlando, Amsterdam and Boston.

It's not hard to see why. One conference organizer in the UK recently described him as an "excellent warm-up man". He explained: "Carr cost us a lot, but in the end, he was worth it. We put him on first and he really stirred up the audience."

After publishing "IT Doesn't Matter" in the Harvard Business Review in May 2003, Carr resigned from his job as executive editor of the Review and worked his ideas up into a book that eventually appeared under the slightly less aggressive title of Does IT Matter?

Agent provocateur

Does IT Matter? might have been intended as a provocation, but its success has institutionalized scepticism about corporate IT. Having changed the terms of debate, how far has Nick Carr moved on?

Carr maintains that Does IT Matter? and The Big Switch share a basic message: that it makes sense to "start thinking about business IT as shared infrastructure".

Primarily, he insists, this is because IT in itself "no longer provides competitive advantage".

"At this level," says Carr, "the big message is consistent."

That said, Carr's thinking has changed in two important ways.

Does IT Matter? felt like the spiky debut of a young man in a hurry. It was written by an outsider, a former management consultant, who peered into the IT department and was worried by what he saw. Like many before him, Carr responded with a simple Neanderthal recipe: follow, don't lead; innovate when risks are low; and focus more on vulnerabilities than on opportunities.