Informatica Enterprise Data Management

Just about everyone has heard about Nicholas Carr’s Harvard Business Review article titled IT Doesn’t Matter. I’ve heard many reactions to the paper presented at conferences and in the blog-o-sphere, so I figured it was time to go to the source and purchased IT Doesn't Matter (HBR OnPoint Enhanced Edition) from Amazon for $6.50 as a downloadable pdf. The paper is excellent in that it presents not only the original paper first written in 2003, but also features no fewer that 14 reactionary letters plus a final response from Carr to the lettersInterestingly, not a single one of the 14 letters agreed with Carr’s fundamental premise (although most of them were polite enough to acknowledge some value in the debate). I don’t know whether it was the editor’s choice to select only negative letters out of the hundreds that I’m sure were submitted, but I suspect these 14 are representative of the masses. So by way of this commentary let me add the 15th letter.

The reason there are so many negative responses to the article is for one simple reason – Nicholas Carr is wrong. I imagine Carr was never an IT practitioner, because if he was he would have known that it’s not the “technology” that is scarce in the modern IT shop, it is the ability to leverage information effectively in a complex enterprise environment. The technology components are indeed commodities as he suggests, but a computer may as well be a boat anchor if it wasn’t for the information it contained and how it is connected to other systems.

Several of the letters from readers reinforce this point. Vijay Gurbaxani states “The situation is subtler than he [Carr] would like us to believe. The scarce resource never was technology, as Carr assumes; it was always the set of managerial capabilities needed to create value with that technology.”

Marianne Broadbent, Mark McDonald and Richard Hunter in their letter write “Sustainable advantage comes from consistently delivering greater value to customers. This comes from the “information” in information technology – that is, it comes from better understanding the customer, applying that understanding to your products, services, and processes, and integrating these to deliver on an improved value proposition.”

I am particularly impressed with Paul Stassmann’s detailed response. Stassmann also has been somewhat critical of IT investments over the years as evidenced by his books on the IT Productivity Paradox – so I was surprised, and pleased, to see his objective rebuttal of Carr’s assertions. The difference between them is that Stassmann is driven by data and facts rather than Carr who makes his arguments based on analogies and metaphors (which are rather weak as it turns out).

It is interesting to note that in Carr’s response letter to the criticism that he seems to be back-peddling. While he still defends, and reiterates, his main points, he seems in fact to be saying that “IT does matter”. It’s about time that Carr, and the editors, admit that the title of the paper is overly provocative and misleading. If the only purpose was to generate debate – then after five years that purpose has been served. Mr. Carr could go a long way to correcting the negative effects of his paper by writing a new one – maybe with a title like “IT matters and here’s why”. What do you think?