Carr refines "IT does not matter" argument

At the recent Effective IT conference in London, industry sceptic Nicholas Carr kicked off proceedings with amodified version of the attack on IT in his book, IT does not matter. Jyoti Banerjee assesses whether the new version stacks up in the light of current IT experience.

It was the Nobel Prize-winning economist from MIT, Robert Solow, who quipped that you could see computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics. In writing his book, Nicholas Carr was simply following in Solow's distinguished footsteps by attacking the value business has got from the massive investments it has made in IT. His argument was that IT does not provide competitive advantage to a business as there is little or no differentiation in the bulk of the technologies used by modern businesses.

Those for and against the argument have had a field day in the IT press, with both sides claiming victory through case studies and stats that prove their point and disprove the opposition. With Carr given the opportunity to rehearse his arguments in front of an audience of IT professionals in London, it was clear that the heat has not gone out of the debate, though one wishes for a little more light all around.

To differentiate or not

Let's explore the debate a little further. One could ask whether it matters that 70-80% of all IT is undifferentiated. After all, the implication could well be that at least 20-30% of all IT is strongly differentiated. Although the two statements are two sides of the same coin, they actually present quite different arguments.