It Doesn't Matter

In the article "IT Doesn't Matter" Carr suggests that IT is no longer strategically important, therefore, organizations need to change the way they approached IT investment and management. Carr does not dispute that information technology is the backbone of commerce that supports individual business operations, vendor supply chains and customer relationship management. He suggests that as IT's power and ubiquity increase, its strategic value or capacity to provide a sustained competitive advantage decreases. He implies that IT is no more significant than electricity at this point to an organization, it is "becoming a cost of doing business that must be paid by all but provide distinction to none. " According to Carr IT has become a commodity and should be managed accordingly.

In the article Carr implies that IT is taking the same historical path as the steam engine, the railroad, the telegraph, the telephone, electric generators and the internal combustion engine. Each of these innovations were built into the fabric of commerce, each one of them had a disruptive effect that eventually transformed the industries they were adopted in. Visionary companies who adopted these technologies early on were able to gain real strategic and economic advantages over their competitors. However, as time passed and the technology became more ubiquitous these things were reduced to nothing more than commodities, costs of doing business that should be no more exciting than using electricity or talking on the telephone.

I suspect that much of what Carr suggested sparked controversy among advocates such as IT vendors, consultants and others who have a vested interest in IT's significance. I agree with much of what Carr has stated, IT is heading towards commodity status, however, I think it is premature to conclude that we are already there and that some companies through clever implementation of information technology do not have a competitive advantage however unsustainable.

The question becomes, when does IT become a commodity? In my opinion a commodity suggests standard components that vary only slightly from vendor to vendor, and standard protocols that must be adopted by all. However, the problem with many IT vendors is that no standard protocol has been adopted to allow for ubiquitous IT integration. We need only look at the cellular telephone industry as an example; most would agree that the cellular telephone industry is maturing, it is saturated to the point of being considered a commodity yet three different standards still exist; TDMA, CDMA and GPRS. The point is that Carr's notion of IT as a commodity and the implication of a ubiquitous infrastructure lends too much credit to an industry that is still very young.

Although there are probably fewer and fewer examples, IT can still provide a strategic and competitive advantage to an organization. The best example that comes to mind is Research In Motion (RIM) the makers of the blackberry handheld communication devices. This is an example of a company that has leveraged information technology to create a competitive advantage over its competitors, and through patents they will probably be able to sustain this advantage for some time

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