Managers as Designers in the Public Services: Beyond Technomagic by David Wastell

Author:David Wastell [Wastell, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Organizational Behavior, Public Affairs & Administration, Political Science, Business & Economics, Management
ISBN: 9781908009319
Google: EvwlDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 14571022
Publisher: Triarchy Press Ltd
Published: 2011-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

DESIGN IN ACTION

IT – commodity or competitive weapon?

No-one would dispute that IT has become the backbone of commerce. The point is, however, that the technology’s potential for differentiating one company from the pack – its strategic potential – inexorably diminishes as it becomes accessible and affordable to all.

So wrote Nick Carr in an article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) in May 2003. Provocatively entitled ‘IT doesn’t matter’, it created something a furore (Carr, 2003). Carr’s argument was simple: that with the advent of generic software packages and standard hardware, IT had become a ubiquitous commodity and, like other “infrastructural technologies” (the railways and electricity), it could no longer confer on businesses a sustainable competitive advantage. A storm of protest was predictably evoked and the following issue of HBR contained a collection of letters extending over 17 pages, from various intellectual grandees. The response by Brown and Hagel61 was typical: yes, they agreed, businesses may have overestimated the strategic value of IT and overspent accordingly, but they saw a dangerous sophistry in Carr’s thesis, exacerbated by its all too memorable title. They argued that “it appears to endorse the notion that organisations should manage IT as a commodity input” (Brown & Hagel, 2003, p.2). Quite the contrary they averred: the real lesson to be learned is that IT “by itself rarely, if ever, confers strategic differentiation. Yet, IT is inherently strategic because of its indirect effects – it creates possibilities and options that did not exist before.” (ibid., p.2). As we saw in Chapter 1, quoting the same pundits, it is only those organisations that use technology as a means of “process innovation” that will gain advantage; simply using technology to automate the status quo will not do.

The imperative for using IT to innovate is not new. An important HBR article, also with a sensational title, had made the same argument somewhat forcefully over ten years previously. Authored by the aptly named Mike Hammer, its punchy title was ‘Reengineering work: don’t automate, obliterate’ (Hammer, 1990). Hammer’s argument was simple: “The heavy investments in information technology have delivered disappointing results largely because companies tend to use technology to mechanise old ways of doing business. They leave existing processes intact and use computers simply to speed them up” (Hammer, 1990, p.104):62

Speeding up those processes cannot address their fundamental performance deficiencies… [they] came of age before the advent of the computer… It is time to stop paving the cow paths. Instead of embedding outdated processes in silicon and software, we should obliterate them and start over. We should re-engineer our businesses: use the power of modern information technology to radically redesign our business processes in order to achieve dramatic improvements in their performance.

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