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IT Doesn't Matter: Nick Carr, Four Years Later

Next month marks the anniversary of a very controversial article that may or may not still apply. It depends on which side of the IT fence you are sitting on, I suppose.

In 2003, Nicholas Carr's Harvard Business Review article "IT Doesn't Matter" and subsequent 2004 book "Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage" sparked outrage in the IT community for its suggestion that multibillion dollar information and Internet technologies would become irrelevant -- if not unnecessary -- as products and services would become standardized and commoditized. The CEO's of Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel immediately denounced Carr's paper, calling the author "short sighted."

But you have to wonder if the argument seems even more relevant now, four years later. Component prices are reaching their lowest levels ever, services are continually outsourced, and Web 2.0 technologies are empowering users.

Call it ironic, but Geoff Kereluik, HP Canada's VP of marketing told a reporter with Canada's IT Business this week that HP's partners and customers should stop referring to business as "information technology" and move on to "something better."

So, four years later, does Carr feel vindicated? Here's the man in his own words:

"I've been fascinated by the shift in the reactions to my article since it came out. The immediate response, from industry insiders, was, 'Don't listen to him. He's totally wrong.' After a while, that changed to, 'He's right about a lot of IT, but not all of it.' Then, after some more time passed, the response changed to, 'He's right in general, but there are important exceptions.' Now, what I tend to hear is, 'He was just stating the obvious.' All in all, I'm not displeased with that trend.

But what's most remarkable -- and most gratifying -- is that after four years the article is still spurring debate and discussion. It achieved its purpose -- and then some.

The main thrust of the article and, more so, the subsequent book, was that information technology should be viewed as a shared infrastructure rather than a source of competitive advantage. Today, IT looks more like a shared infrastructure then ever before, and I think the big challenge over the next four years, for vendors and users alike, will be to adapt to the new computing grid."

Carr said his next book, "The Big Shift," will look at that challenge, as well as the broader business and social implications of the shift of computing away from private data centers and toward the public Internet.

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