Tapscott V. Carr (again)

SIMposium Executive Summit 2005 ended yesterday in Boston. The event, sponsored by the Society for Information Management saw a replay of the argument about whether "IT Doesn't Matter" -- an idea that gained considerable traction during the first half of the decade with the publication of a HBR article and book by the same title by Harvard Business School professor Nicholas G. Carr.

Well, the bad old days of the meltdown are over and we're still talking about it . . . or at least Don Tapscott is. He is the author of those pre-meltdown best sellers Digital Capital: Harnessing the Power of Business Webs and Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation. In his SIMposium keynote he said that he has debated Carr a dozen times on this issue. Tapscott's point: that IT is different from "boxes and wires." It's all about information, and that never gets old.

No, but this debate does. By now I think almost everyone agrees that the boom-bust Internet cycle was like other technology cycles (say, 19th Century railroads) where investors overbuy the early optimism. The Panic of 1893 saw the bankruptcy of virtually every railroad in the country (and by then there were lots of them). Real growth happened later -- when railroads pulled the country out of recession until automobiles took over in the 1920s. Back then it wasn't about box cars and tracks either. It was about people getting the stuff inside fast -- just like now.

If the pattern holds, we are just beginning to see the Internet's sustainable benefits. That's partly due to technology catching up to the hype and partly due (as Tapscott says) to a new generation of users getting past the hype. As I've said here before, the impact of technology is not commoditization; it's bifurcation -- with the truely talented benefiting most. Tech itself is a commodity, and information is becoming one. That leaves insight.