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It Doesn't Matter

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“IT Doesn’t Matter”
Management Information Systems

The Idea that “IT Doesn’t Matter” as proposed by Nicholas Carr in the Harvard Business Review article that was published in 2003 raises just as many questions as it does answers to this very question as well as it has stirred up quite a bit of controversy over since its publication. What Carr is saying unlike the title of the paper he does not say there is no need for IT. The idea was to draw up controversy. Carr’s argument is to have a strategic advantage within IT. Something no one else has is extremely important. IT has become a huge cost for many organizations but other things have gone down in cost. Our Infrastructural technology of today in terms of transportation of goods it helps deflate prices. It is essential for competition to have IT but inconsequential for strategy for many organizations. What Carr is saying essentially is yes IT is an important to tool to help organizations achieve their goals daily however it is not the core of the business. The core is the strategy that each company possesses that makes it stand out from the rest and ultimately make that organization successful. The title of the original HBR article was misleading. Mr. Carr is not arguing that information technology doesn’t matter. Of course it does. Among other things, IT improves productivity by reducing communications, search, and trans- action costs, and by automating all sorts of tasks previously done by humans. But Mr. Carr asserts that as IT matures, spreads, and becomes more standardized, the strategic advantage any individual firm can gain from technology diminishes.
You can have the best computer system with the best programmers in the industry but without a core strategy to use the IT tool correctly your core business is utterly useless and failure is imminent. As Carr compares IT to the railroad system in the mid

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