Patricia Keefe

Kicking up the debate on the future of IT another notch is Nicholas G. Carr's sure-to-be-controversial contention in this month's Harvard Business Review that the pervasiveness of IT will soon make it strategically irrelevant. Summing up his position is the article's headline:

January is the Monday of the year. The big-sigh, gotta-get-back-to-it, foot-dragging mentality permeates everything. It's excessively gray and filled with humorless resolve. Even so, a spanking new year is still cause for hope and excitement.

We received a letter last week from a dispirited worker with 15 years of IT experience. He's been laid off, can't find a job and expects to leave the profession. He says the influx of cheap labor that cost him his job is "the beginning of the dismantling of the American technology worker."