It Dosen Matter

IT Doesn’t matter -By Nicholas G. Carr

Ever since the first microprocessor was invented back in 1965, Information Technology has increasingly proven that it is the back bone of commerce. It oversees the running of operations in a company, helps supply chain management and acts as the bridge between clients and the business. And in time the attitude of top management towards Information Technology had changed dramatically in favor of it. This change has brought about a common assumption that IT has not only increased in potency but also now of strategic value to the company. This is mistaken. This paper by Nicholas G. Carr talks about the fact that IT is not truly of strategic value to the company.

What makes a resource truly Strategic Value to a company. It is the scarcity of that resource. The ability of a company to have or do something that its competitors do not have. And we know that IT is clearly available to everyone. They have in fact become just another commodity for production or another cost to for doing business.

A clear demarcation is to be made between proprietary technologies and infrastructural technologies. Proprietary technologies being owned by a single company. And infrastructural technologies that are of better effectiveness if shared among companies.

Information Technology clearly is an Infrastructural Technology. At first IT is more of a transportation mechanism. It helps transport data and is most powerful when shared and not used in isolation. IT doesn’t matter in a sense were IT is not the prime business of the company, but IT should be used as a service rather than focusing on creating IT solutions as a prime business. Use IT as lubricant not fuel.

IT is highly replicable, it is hard to imagine a more perfect commodity than a byte of data endlessly and perfectly reproducible at virtually no cost. Due to IT standardization the cost savings and the interoperability benefits make the sacrifice of distinctiveness unavoidable...