IT Doesn't Matter, or so claimed a headline in the Harvard Business Review last May. The author of the article, Nicholas Carr, was surprised by the volume of response, and perhaps by the hostility it provoked. He has now returned to the fray with a book, Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage. In this, he writes: "I offer a broader and deeper analysis of the role of IT in business and commerce."
It could hardly be shallower. In a Stupid-Journal Alert in Fortune magazine, the short article was attacked by David Kirkpatrick as "a sloppy mix of ersatz history, conventional wisdom, moderate insight, and unsupportable assertion. And it is dangerously wrong."
Carr's basic thesis was that IT has become a commodity, and delivers no sustainable competitive advantage because, like electricity, it is equally available to everyone.
The obvious problem with this idea is that there are dozens of well-known companies who have gained enormous competitive advantage from their use of IT. These include Google, Amazon, eBay, Dell and Apple.
Clearly, just buying whatever commodity IT products Amazon uses would not turn Barnes & Noble into Amazon.
Of course, this point runs contrary to western civilisation's most important sales pitch, which is that you can buy success. Buy a new typewriter and you can become a famous author; buy a new set of golf clubs and you will play better than Tiger Woods; buy new computers and your business will immediately be transformed. Surely we don't need the Harvard Business Review to point out the foolishness of this idea.
But Carr makes some good points. In the preface to the book, for example, he cedes that IT "has delivered great benefits to a handful of firms, even propelling a few into positions of industry leadership, but for most businesses it has been a source more of frustration and disappointment than of glory. It has allowed many companies to substantially cut their labour costs and working capital, but it has also led managers to plough cash into risky and misguided initiatives, sometimes with catastrophic results."
Indeed, you could fill several large books with accounts of disastrous IT projects. Even worse, you could fill whole libraries with accounts of small IT disasters - the inept, user-hostile designs and appalling code produced by so many IT departments - which are far too trivial to attract attention.
Even if we are sure that IT does matter, we can still agree that not all of IT matters equally to all companies. Some applications, such as payroll, have been commoditised for decades, and can easily be done using packaged software, or outsourced to a bureau, or whatever. More and more applications are commoditised every year. The problem is trying to get companies to stop messing about with the parts of IT that really don't matter - because they are or should be viewed as part of the common infrastructure - and focus on the parts that do.
Unfortunately, that will need more than a book. It will need a miracle.
Does IT Matter? - the book
http://homepages.borland.com/dthorpe/blog/delphi
