Nicholas Carr - Essay Example

Running Head: Article Summary The Major Points of Nicholas Carr’s It Doesn’t Matter The article of Nicholas Carr entitled It Doesn’t Matter will certainly provoke reactions of indignation from the different involved sectors and individuals he belittled, but he lays open the industry of information technology (IT) to the indifferent perception of tactical business study. Carr’s assumption is severe, that is, IT is an automatic outlay of conducting business and, per se, the top management should reorient their activities toward more hard-line cost management.

Carr claims that the primary IT-connected threat is not that a contender will employ IT to acquire competitive leverage, but instead that breakdowns in the system can impede the ability of the company to continue business operations. As expected, this is a full reorientation from the manner IT is depicted. For several years, people have been taught the notion that IT is an indispensable resource for strategic business. However, Carr persuasively explains that the age of the strategic significance of IT has gone by.

From the point of view of business, strategic leverage arises from shortage, not fullness. The universal character of IT has made it another crucial component of the business world. Although the notion of strategic significance may have been reasonable in the formative years of IT, nobody predicted the current global recognition of these technologies. Similar to earlier scholars, Carr evaluates the progress of IT against other industries like electricity, transportation, and communication. Studying how technologies influence firm-level competition, Carr compares infrastructure and private technologies.

The latter can be owned by a company and employed as the foundation of continuous competitive leverage. The former are accessible to everyone and are typified by principles, diminishing prices, and heightened competition. The critical argument of Carr is not that information technology is of no use, but instead, that it is ‘futile’ from a strategic point of view. It will not endow continuous competitive leverage. The argument of Carr is that when all organizations have access to similar software, similar hardware, and similar network provider, IT stops to be a tactical advantage.

Although IT undoubtedly will not vanish, it will stop being a primary issue of corporate meetings. Carr claims that the transformation of IT into a commodity demands an adjustment in business strategies. When an asset turns into an indispensable resource, the focus moves from the leverage it offers to the threats it produces. Companies, from an operational perspective, cannot incur serious failures in their major systems. Redundancy and supports normally increase the expenditure of a system, and hence these components are broadly incorporated only where there is valid commerce reason.

Processors of credit cards will have a number of redundancy stages in central production mechanisms. More importantly, one of the ultimate threats Carr discussed is excessive spending. As emphasized by Carr, “The time has come for F buyers to throw their weight around, to negotiate contracts that ensure the long-term usefulness of their PC investments and impose hard limits on upgrade costs” (Carr, 2003, 11). Unnecessary expenditures, from a tactical point of view, place organizations at a competitive difficulty.