Critque on It Doesn't Matter

Critique on “IT Doesn’t Matter” by Robert Stone for EMBA 226

One could argue that IT doesn’t matter anymore than electricity “doesn’t matter”, but that argument in and of itself proves false. Electricity matters in industry, but it isn’t the focus because all industries have it and it is ubiquitous. In many cases, the same may be true for IT, but in many cases it absolutely is not true.

Consider Amazon dot com. Does IT matter? IT is the core of their business. Without IT Amazon doesn’t exist. There are, of course, hundreds if not thousands of similar examples. IT matters if you are in the IT business, or if your business relies heavily on IT. Take the business of banking or airlines, does IT matter? Without IT banks and airlines couldn’t function. One could argue that they couldn’t function without electricity either, but the difference is that electricity is a monopoly supplied by outside venders, while IT is something that has to be implemented and run by the business itself. There is no outside monopoly supplying IT to everyone in a town like electricity.

If providing electricity relied on inside technicians, and power plants owned by firms, it would matter also. This is the very nature of IT. Purchasing IT applications, platforms, and bandwidth demands both hardware and software, and people to keep that hardware and software running. While firms are dependent on both IT and electricity, they pretty much have to provide and support their IT unlike their electricity.