Thoughts on IT doesn’t matter

2011-08-01T04:20:00.000-07:00

In the article “It doesn’t matter” written by Nicholas Carr for the Harvard Business Review some interesting points are brought up such as the “Commoditization of IT”, “Vanishing advantages” and the Fact that IT will no longer give a company any distinct advantage.

A lot of Carr’s points are valid, IT has reached a point much like electricity and transportation has, it’s a huge disadvantage not to have it, it’s a hygiene factor. Modern businesses need IT to complete basic day to day task’s dumping millions of dollars into trying to gain a completive edge is money lost because everybody’s using it. We don’t see companies wasting millions on revamping electrical networks now do we?

In the boom days of IT Companies where at each other’s throats to get that edge with proprietary technologies but now IT has all become standardized its essential to competition. The edge in IT is more to do with how efficiently can you business use its resources rather than how much you have, though some aspects of IT specialization are still very competitive.

There are some points I tend to disagree with such as his statement of having considerably more fibre optic networks than we need. Toady Industry is leaning to cloud computing and storing large amounts of data offsite, for this to be strategic we need fast connections worldwide capable of sending these large amounts of data in a timely fashion. If a business begin using virtual workstations in the cloud we can’t have slow connections holding up productivity IT services are there to help complete business objectives not be a hindrance and that will not be possible with fast fibre networks.

So Carr does raise some very good points but The date of the article (May 2003) Leaves his view out of touch with the new way IT is heading online, We need more speed and we need it now.

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Thoughts on IT doesn’t matter