IT doesn't matter

I stepped into the ring in this week's column to comment on Nicholas Carr's Harvard Business Review essay: "IT Doesn't Matter." [available here for $7 from Amazon].    As I said in my column, this is must-read information not just for CTOs and CIOs, but for anyone working in IT.  Carr catalogs many of the responses to his piece in the media and elsewhere on his web site.

While I agree that what Carr defines as IT ("the technologies used for processing, storing, and transporting information in digital form") is a commodity, I think his definition is too narrow and views IT within a sterile vacuum.  It's still not easy to put it all together and make it work because the successful assembly of IT "commodity inputs" is not a commodity itself.  Think of IT like the food that comes into a restaurant -- yes, the meat and vegetables most restaurants use are commodities that anyone can buy themselves, but what the restaurant does with the food is what really matters.