Comment Articles

Does it matter if IT matters? Yes and no

Kevin Francis ZDNet.com

Published: 31 Oct 2003 13:20 GMT

A singular event in May churned the information technology community, and the ripples continue to spread outwards to its distant shores.

The Harvard Business Review that month published an article by Nicholas G Carr with the title, "IT Doesn't Matter." Carr posited that some parts of information technology are destined to go the way of electricity and locomotives. He wasn't really breaking any news, but he was caught writing down what many knew in their hearts to be true but didn't dare say aloud.

The article was like a blow landing on a bruise. The IT community, wracked by a historic economic downturn (recession? depression? correction?), did not suffer Carr's insights in silence. Almost immediately, the protests began. A blizzard of buzz began creating deep drifts of denials and dodges, trying to obscure the truth of his thesis.

Simply put, Carr wrote that IT is no longer a monolithic business function. Almost thirty years down the road, IT could finally be parsed into distinct functions that create a strategic competitive advantage -- or not -- but are still critical.

Shocking, eh?

Most of Carr's vociferous critics either only read the article's headline or conveniently neglected to mention that he also described how, sometimes, IT can create competitive advantages. In fact, he detailed the dramatic competitive advantages achieved by United Airlines, Federal Express, Mobile Oil, eBay, Reuters, Wal-Mart Stores and Dell. But his point is that these companies are the exception rather than the rule. Few companies are ingenious enough to sharpen IT to a corporate competitive edge. Instead, most companies are simply supplying the necessary equivalent of data as a utility, or "datatricity," toms of information workers.

And this is a good thing.

Much to the delight of the shareholders of Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Intel and Oracle, IT has become a ubiquitous and critical service. Today, datatricity is simply the price of admission to most of our contests of capitalism. For a brief and fleeting moment, the benefit of word processing may have given a company a new way to win, but now it is simply the way documents are done. Microsoft Word isn't the IT engine behind Federal Express' package-tracking system. And so forth.