NICHOLAS CARR
Who Consultant and journalist
Why Watch? Explosive
Harvard Business Review piece
declared infotech irrelevant; upcoming book will renew acrid
debate.
Last spring, Nicholas Carr's article in the prestigious
Harvard
Business Review, "IT Doesn't Matter," slapped the tech world
upside the head, unleashing what one reporter called "the
rhetorical equivalent of a 50-megaton smart bomb." Another
commentator, going just a bit over the top, likened it to Martin
Luther's 95 theses.
In a nutshell, Carr argues that
information technology has become
just another commodity, part of the corporate infrastructure like
electricity. Everyone uses pretty much the same hardware and
software to do pretty much the same things, so there's no longer
any competitive advantage to be gained from snapping up the latest
bells and whistles. That's good news for many a CEO eager to cut
costs, but a chilling prescription for major IT vendors and
corporate CIOs whose importance grew with the late-90s tech
boom.
Carr's bombshell - denounced by the likes of
Bill Gates, Intel's
Craig Barrett, and, of course, the ever-pugnacious
Scott McNealy of
Sun Microsystems - is still being cussed and discussed by the
geekerati. Now, Carr's legion of critics is bracing for his
book-length salvo due out this year. Just don't look for any
latte-stoked book-signing parties at
Microsoft headquarters.
CAROL KOVAC
Who General Manager,
IBM Life Sciences
Why Watch? Her team supplies supercomputing muscle that's
remaking the world of medicine.
Since the human genome was decoded in 2000, scientists and medical
researchers have been deluged with an ever-increasing flood of
data. Seeing a major opportunity for its supercomputing and
data-management operations, IBM that year created its Life Sciences
unit, headed by Carol Kovac, a veteran IBM researcher.