IT Doesn't Matter by Nicholas Carr: Reflection
1- Reflection on the article of Carr
In May 2003, Harvard Business Review (HBR), a magazine mainly addressed to business people in general such as managers, analysts and strategists etc., and IT constituencies in particular such as vendors, researchers, engineers etc., published a revolutionary article written by Nicholas Carr entitled “IT doesn't Matter”. This article has created a huge debate within the IT industry, from opponents and proponents the opinions differ considerably. So in order to understand the debate better, we will start in a first part to reflect on the arguments Carr presented to support his thesis, then we will have a closer look on what other scholars think about the article before concluding in the last part by giving our personal opinion.
Carr is known as an independent writer and editor who has a good knowledge about the IT field and has written and guided many works about it; due to these status and reputation, Carr's main idea which is quite simple took rapidly a huge magnitude worldwide (Hackathorn, 2003). He stated that IT is very essential to businesses but does not provide them with competitive advantages anymore. Knowledge in general and information in particular are commonly considered as power (Davies, 1994). Knowing what others don't know especially when they may need to know it, gives you certainly more power over them and a competitive advantage you may benefit from a lot. However, with the increase of information technologies, especially the Internet, the access to information is becoming easier and its availability increases continuously with time which make the information worth less and of no strategic value. The financial market is the best example to better understand this idea. In fact within these kind of markets, information and its interpretation are the two main drivers of success and thus generators of higher profits. When information concerning a specific company or any financial asset is of limited access
In May 2003, Harvard Business Review (HBR), a magazine mainly addressed to business people in general such as managers, analysts and strategists etc., and IT constituencies in particular such as vendors, researchers, engineers etc., published a revolutionary article written by Nicholas Carr entitled “IT doesn't Matter”. This article has created a huge debate within the IT industry, from opponents and proponents the opinions differ considerably. So in order to understand the debate better, we will start in a first part to reflect on the arguments Carr presented to support his thesis, then we will have a closer look on what other scholars think about the article before concluding in the last part by giving our personal opinion.
Carr is known as an independent writer and editor who has a good knowledge about the IT field and has written and guided many works about it; due to these status and reputation, Carr's main idea which is quite simple took rapidly a huge magnitude worldwide (Hackathorn, 2003). He stated that IT is very essential to businesses but does not provide them with competitive advantages anymore. Knowledge in general and information in particular are commonly considered as power (Davies, 1994). Knowing what others don't know especially when they may need to know it, gives you certainly more power over them and a competitive advantage you may benefit from a lot. However, with the increase of information technologies, especially the Internet, the access to information is becoming easier and its availability increases continuously with time which make the information worth less and of no strategic value. The financial market is the best example to better understand this idea. In fact within these kind of markets, information and its interpretation are the two main drivers of success and thus generators of higher profits. When information concerning a specific company or any financial asset is of limited access