Should M organisations be listening to Nick Carr?

Nicholas Carr wants companies to spend less on IT. M Institute co-founder Jyoti Banerjee ponders that advice on behalf of medium enterprises.

At last week's London debate with Bob McDowell of Microsoft, Nicholas Carr restated his well-known perspective: IT does not add strategic value to an organisation, so companies should spend less on it, and business leaders should intentionally choose to be IT followers, not leaders.

What was different about this debate from many similar ones was the focus applied to medium organisations. Carr's usual analysis is based on large enterprises But does this approach work for medium enterprises as well?

My instinct is that Carr's ideas work better for medium enterprises than they do for larger organisations.

Typical medium enterprises don't have the budget, bandwidth or business practice to justify expensive investments in what Carr calls distinctive technologies. Instead, they prefer their tech to be low, and their infrastructure commoditised.

Of course, there are at least three caveats that are worth pointing out.