Brief introduction of IT elite

Carl's. What does that mean? In that article, he didn't make it clear, but he mentioned the core functions of information technology-data storage, processing and transmission. From the logic of his reasoning, that is, from the infrastructure construction such as steam engine, railway, telegraph and telephone, electric power, Moore's law has also been used to prove the development of mainframe and optical fiber. If he stops here, only from this point, his logical argument is very rigorous. Those who comment that "it is no longer important" basically agree with this (except those hardware and network vendors), and the author also agrees with this. In the whole article, he paid a lot of attention to the materialized IT infrastructure construction, and basically did not pay attention to the application level. But later, when he talked about the trend of popularization, he also mentioned that "information technology is easy to be copied", which pushed it to commercial software, which has taken a "dangerous" step. In 2004, when he published the book of the same name, he defined the IT he studied and compared. "When I use' IT', I mean all the hardware and software used to store, process and transmit information in digital form. It is particularly emphasized that I only refer to the technology itself, and the' it' I refer to does not include the information flowing in the technology and the skills of the talents who use the technology ",so he refers to its first two layers. If we stop here this time, there may not be much controversy (this time with those uncomfortable software vendors). Objectively analyzing the characteristics of software itself does not have three of the four criteria of core competitiveness, namely scarcity, difficulty in copying and difficulty in substitution. Carl himself does not deny that he has the fourth criterion of core competitiveness, namely value. But he just decided that the topic was "It doesn't matter anymore" and wanted to kill it with a stick!

Unfortunately, he often confuses the concept of IT: one refers to the host network and the other refers to the software. In his later books, he even "accidentally" went to the third floor, which completely violated the IT scope defined by him at the beginning of the book, such as discussing the application of information technology and questioning CIO. Many readers, including the editor of Harvard Business Review, pointed this out at that time. Many people attacked him for it, and some even said that Carl didn't understand it at all, which may be true because he didn't do it after all. This also gives us researchers great enlightenment and vigilance, and we should be especially careful when applying other methods in areas we are not familiar with, otherwise many jokes will be made.

Here, I want to emphasize that software vendors (both at home and abroad) often claim that they can strengthen the core competitiveness of enterprises through informationization (anyway, they just follow the popular things and "keep pace with the times"). I don't know whether they are intentional or unintentional, nor do they infer according to the four standards of core competitiveness. Try to ask a few simple questions: what will happen if they go informatization? How many de-informatized enterprises have lost money or even closed down? Especially those software companies that claim that hundreds of thousands of customers use their software should ask themselves. What if it's informationized? If all information such as warehousing, warehousing, sales and inventory are assumed to be accurate, can sales be automatically increased and inventory reduced? If before informatization, the boss may be confused but happy because he can't see it, then now, it is painful to know how much inventory has stayed in the warehouse for a long time, and so many goods have occupied the counter for a long time without bringing any sales, let alone profits! There are only two conclusions to analyze the phenomenon that software manufacturers publicize that "information technology is the core competitiveness of enterprises": either these enterprises don't understand what core competitiveness is (I think most of them do, and I hope they do and they don't), and the result is that software enterprises can at least understand some management concepts instead of burying themselves in purely technical companies, and I hope that they don't understand because they have no professional ethics and can be attacked less by others, so people who don't know can't stand it, or they have other reasons. There is a serious information asymmetry between general enterprise customers and IT enterprises. The final result of the game between IT enterprises and enterprise customers is often the suboptimal choice, the so-called "lemon effect". At this point, in addition to IT enterprises and employees to improve their professional ethics, the government or industry must strengthen the training and education of informatization construction, improve enterprises' understanding of informatization construction, and introduce management consulting companies and supervision companies to change the outcome of this game, so as to achieve a new balance and promote the healthier development of IT industry.