Does IT Matter?

In a May 2003 article in the Harvard Business Review entitled “IT Doesn’t Matter,” Nicholas G. Carr introduced the idea that information technology (IT) does not provide a competitive advantage to companies in a strategic manner. In Does IT Matter?, Carr argues that IT has become a commodity, and because the very nature of strategy requires differentiation, IT cannot possibly qualify. IT can be used to supplement and improve strategy implementation, but it is not the foundation of a competitive advantage. To handle this new approach to IT, executives will have to prevent the commoditization of IT architecture and applications from destroying their companies’ barriers to competitive advantages.

• How information technology (IT) transformed from a potential strategic advantage to a commoditized cost of doing business.
• How the infrastructural technology of IT is like previous infrastructural innovations such as telephone lines and telegraph wires.
• Why the only way for IT to fulfill its potential is to become a shared, standardized utility.
• How mitigating risk and controlling cost are becoming more important than innovation and investment in IT.
• How companies coming together to share new technology can corrode individual advantage while increasing the benefit for the economy at large.
• How IT has affected productivity.