Enterprise 2.0<\/a>” for the MIT Sloan Management Review,<\/i> which argued that Web 2.0 technologies may require a basic rethinking of the way businesses approach IT, the new piece, called “Mastering the Three Worlds of Information Technology,” is more, well, academic. As its title suggests, it’s one of those dry scholarly exercises in categorization that spend a lot of time explaining stuff that most managers understand intuitively.<\/p>\nEchoing the work of other IT scholars, most notably MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson, McAfee argues that IT success in business today is less about technology than about good old-fashioned management: “Everyone who has studied companies\u2019 frustrations with IT argues that technology projects are increasingly becoming managerial challenges rather than technical ones.” Success hinges, in particular, on how well you manage IT’s “organizational complements” such as the design of processes, the rules of governance, and the talents of people. What’s new in McAfee’s piece is the idea that the importance of such complements, and hence management’s role in IT management, varies according the type of IT a company is installing.<\/p>\n
McAfee identifies three categories of IT: “Function IT” (FIT) is the kind that, like a word-processing or computer-aided-design program, “make[s] the execution of stand-alone tasks more efficient.” “Network IT” (NIT) is the stuff that, like Lotus Notes or wikis, helps employees communicate and collaborate. Finally, “Enterprise IT” (EIT) consists of the heavy-duty systems that automate big corporate processes – CRM and ERP systems, for instance. While FIT and NIT don’t “impose complements” on companies, EIT does. In other words, EIT forces you to make certain changes to your processes, your governance structure, and so on. And while FIT and EIT typically require a strong top-down management push to encourage their adoption by employees, NIT tends to be, McAfee argues (not entirely convincingly), welcomed by employees. Management’s main role is to get the hell out of the way.<\/p>\n
This kind of categorization can be useful in adding precision to the language we use to discuss complex subjects. It helps us get beyond big, ill-defined generalizations. But there’s a drawback. It can prevent us from seeing how categories blend together. By drawing bright lines between things, it can give the illusion that those things are more distinct than they really are. I sense that problem here (even while granting the usefulness of McAfee’s categorization). Take the identification of CRM as an enterprise information technology. Isn’t that assumption exactly what doomed so many big CRM projects? The projects lost sight of the fact that CRM is as much a functional tool, a tool that helps individual employees, like salespeople, do their work better, as an enterprise system. CRM, in other words, is as much FIT as EIT. And, in fact, there’s a lot of NIT in it as well.<\/p>\n
What’s exciting about IT today, I’d argue, is that we can finally begin to get beyond old dysfunctional categories. Software-as-a-service products, like the CRM systems provided by Salesforce.com or NetSuite or RightNow, are compelling not simply because they allow companies to avoid big capital expenses, but because they begin to break down the monolithic complexity of traditional enterprise systems and give more control to the individual user – they turn EIT into FIT. We certainly need to appreciate the differences in IT tools and systems, but, even more important, we need to begin to see beyond the distinctions that weren’t true differences at all, but were merely the byproducts of immature technology. From this perspective, McAfee’s article may not be quite as clarifying as it is intended to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The brouhaha that surrounded my Harvard Business Review article “IT Doesn’t Matter,” published in May 2003, seems to have scared HBR away from the topic of IT altogether. I can’t for the life of me think of a single substantial article that it’s published on the topic in the succeeding three and a half years. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}