Does IT Matter?

geoff313 asks: "I'm sure many of you are aware of the uproar over Nicholas Carr's article 'IT Doesn't Matter' which was published in the Harvard Business Review, back in May. While many big names in the IT world have responded already to Carr's article (Ballmer has declared it 'Hogwash' and Fiorina has pronounced it 'Dead Wrong'), Carr debated vendor executives Monday at the Comdex trade show, proving that the issues he raised are still resonaating through the industry. Do you feel that corporate IT budgets should be focusing on cutting edge technology to best serve its customer's needs, or should they focus on shoring up what they have now in order to maximize its usefulness to the customer? Some background can be found from the Washington Post, InfoWorld, and ZDNet, as well as at Nicholas Carr's site."

"For those of you unfamiliar his philosophy, it can be summed up pretty thoroughly by his statement 'Follow, don't lead,' arguing that the huge advances in the IT industry over the last two decades have erased the strategic advantage to be had by corporations for staying at the cutting edge of technology. In short, he advises 'executives need to shift their attention from IT opportunities to IT risks - from offense to defense.' Of course the head honchos at IBM and Microsoft disagreed with him, citing Wal-Mart's use of RFID tags to keep track of inventory and other forward thinking IT decisions as a refutation of his thesis.

What I am interested in is the opinion of those in trenches of the IT war."

Comments

I submitted story twice more than month ago!

[Anonymous Coward]

Twice, with supporting URLs.

Seeing this submitted by someone else more than a month after I submitted it and it hit general purview is surprisingly painful. I feel like a fool for having submitted anything to /.

What goes on at /.? Does a group of preferred authors cherry-pick submissions, reject them and then later submit edited versions as their own articles? Sure seems so.

There will be no more submissions from me. I will now assume a much more jaded view of how /. content is chosen. I will seek other sources of information. Forget any further meta-moderation from me. Furthermore, save your advice about grousing; you've fucked me over here, that means you probably fuck most submittors over in a similar manner.