Rating: 
Summary: Asks Some Important Questions
Review: Thouhg there are many points that will cause controversy and some that are not quite as thought through as they should be, this book raises some important questions about the role of IT that need to be examined, especially in the context of the highly polarized arguments that have recently erupted about the subject.
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Summary: Urge all your competitors to read this book!
Review: Two Harvard professors summarized Carr's ideas ... the most dangerous advice to CEOs has come from people who either had no idea of what they didn't know, or from those who pretended to know what they didn't. What you want is for your competitors to read this book, hoping they will buy into Carr's misconceptions and dangerous recommendations... so rate it 5 stars for them, while your company pursues IT that does matter. If any of your technology-challenged board members are reading this book, be sure to point them to Don Tapscott's May article in CIO magazine so they will quickly understand Carr's Blueprint for Failure, and to Smith and Fingar's book, IT Doesn't Matter--Business Processes Do, for a complete critical analysis of Carr's superficial premises and misguided recommendations. You may also want to google: Does IT Matter, An HBR Debate, whence the opening comments of this review came. Meanwhile, be sure all your competitors know how wonderful and meaningful this book is. ;-)Dr. Martin Bushton, former CEO, consumer products company
Rating: 
Summary: A valuable guide
Review: When I saw the hysterical reaction of some big wigs in the tech industry to Carr's argument (Steve Ballmer called it "hogwash"), it made it seem like the author was an anti-technology extremist. So I was surprised to find this book to be so calmly written and so knowledgeable about the history of information technology. Carr isn't saying that IT is unimportant or that technological progress won't continue but that most companies won't be able to use IT itself to provide a strategic advantage. He shows that companies like American Airlines and Reuters used to be able to use their systems to block competitors, but that's not possible anymore. In fact, he says, trying to get an advantage by creating a customized system will probably backfire by being too costly and complicated. It's better to just find a standardized solution that does what you want it to do at the lowest cost possible. This seems to me fairly sensible advice, and Carr provides a lot of evidence to support it. The book puts IT into a broader context which I found very helpful.
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Summary: IT a strategic investment or just cost?
Review: When I started with this book, I was quite skeptical about the books thesis: Does IT matter? That seemed to me a quite ridiculous statement, of course did it matter. So why I bought it anyway? Because this book gave such a stir in the IT community. I started wondering why? Why are their so many people using such laud words to reject the book? To me it seems the book (and the original article in Harvard Business Review) must have hit some nerve on quite a vulnerable place.
After reading the book, I can say, that the title of the book is a bit of a teaser, because the book is much more balanced. The book praises the innovations of IT and it importance for mankind. Also it does not deny that IT work is important to companies and often a very complex task. To know what the book is all about it is better to look to the subtitle: "IT and the corrosion of the competitive advantage". It's all about the question: is IT a strategic investment or just spend on a commodity (cost). The writer underwrites the later and states that companies should spend defensive on IT.
That IT is a commodity might sound strange at first but the writer has quite convincing arguments for this claim. He shows that it is in many situations quite hard to keep a competitive advantage, based on IT, long enough to justify the investment. Because IT innovations are going so fast, that today's innovations become tomorrow's commodities, and that erodes the strategic investment. You can imagine that statements like these do not make IT vendors happy. Because if IT is not strategic by it self, maybe even just a cost, it is much harder to sell the latest technological innovations.
But this book is not about squeezing IT vendors. This well written book is about how we should interpret the role of IT in organizations and builds a case for a more defensive IT spending. It makes this point with strong and balanced arguments with lots of references to history and other research. A good read!
Rating:
Summary: Provocative title, narrow claim, strong argument
Review: You may recall the uproar in 2003 around a short Harvard Business Review article entitled "IT Doesn't Matter". Various IT company leaders spoke out against the article, with Carly Fiorina calling it "dead wrong" and Steve Ballmer calling it "hogwash". There were also many lengthy rebuttals. Nicholas Carr, the author of the original 8 page article, expanded the argument into a well-written book, explaining his claim more thoroughly and responding to his critics. The book (like the article) has a provocative title, but in fact Carr's claim is much narrower than the title suggests. Carr is only focused on *corporate IT*, the systems that companies build and deploy for their own use and the use of their customers and suppliers. He is not looking at consumer IT --- the digital wonders that are showing up in our living rooms, cars, and in our pockets. And he is not looking at governmental IT --- the systems that are used to find terrorists, wage combat, or evaluate welfare eligibility. More significantly, Carr is also focused on one corporate use of IT, to attain a *competitive advantage*. Can Coke achieve some competitive advantage over Pepsi by implementing a new application? Carr is not asking whether IT can add value to a company --- clearly there are thousands of examples of IT saving money, providing value to customers, to suppliers, and adding value in other ways. Instead, Carr asks whether we can expect IT to add this value in a way that competitors cannot quickly realize the same added value. Can Coke do something significant with IT that will not be quickly replicated by Pepsi? Finally, Carr agrees that in the past IT has been used to gain competitive advantages. By automating reservations, pricing, and seat assignments in the 1960s, American Airlines really did achieve a lasting advantage over its rivals. By creating logistics applications in the 1980s, Walmart really did achieve a lasting advantage over Sears and Kmart. Carr's claim is that *those days are gone*, that the days of using IT for competitive advantage are over. His claim rests on three broad trends, each of which undercuts the opportunities for competitive advantage. First, the time needed to replicate a particular IT application---the "technology replication cycle" in his words---has shortened considerably over the last few decades. Hardware, tools and platform technologies have made it increasingly easier, faster, and cheaper to replicate a successful application built elsewhere. This declining technology cycle is likely to continue, and make any advantage in the ownership of a particular application to be short-lived. Another reinforcing trend is the push toward standardization. 40 years ago every company built their own applications. Since then software products have emerged. These products can always be customized to particular situations, but they often are not. It is often cheaper and easier to adapt the business to the best practices in SAP, rather than to customize SAP to the specifics of the business. The economics of standardization --- the cost advantages for companies to be like their competitors --- trump the advantages of maintaining differences. BPOs further this push to standardization, and away from competitive advantage via IT. A third trend is the spread of IT business insight. It is much better understood today how to achieve value with IT. The secrets of how to do this spreads with individual experience, with analysts, with books and trade rags, and with consultants. If a company has success with a particular technology, everyone in their industry knows about it quickly. These three trends (Carr claims) are reducing IT to a role much like electricity. Electricity is critical to all businesses today, but (aside from mishaps like the recent problems in California) no one would expect to find a competitive advantage in superior use of electricity. Does Carr make his case? I think he does, although there are some big exceptions to his argument.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent questions with inferior answers
Review: `Does IT Matter' is a difficult book to rate. As to the questions it raises, it deserves 5 stars. But its answers, are two-star, at best. By way of analogy, most bomb threats are bogus, but each one must be treated as if it were genuine. With that, in his new book Does IT Matter?, Nicholas Carr throws a bomb, and it turns out to be a dud. Carr's book is an outgrowth of his article "IT Doesn't Matter," which appeared in the May 2003 issue of the Harvard Business Review. His hypothesis is that the strategic importance of IT has diminished. Carr views IT as a commodity, akin to electricity. He also compares IT to the railroad infrastructure. In the early days, railroads that had their own tracks had a huge advantage, but once the rails become ubiquitous and open, that advantage went away. Carr feels that since all companies can purchase the same hardware and software, any strategic advantage is obviated. It's true that the core functions of IT (processing, network transport, storage, etc.) are affordable and available to all, but there's still huge strategic advantage to be gained in how they're implemented. It's much like two airlines that purchase the same model of airplane. If one airline streamlines and optimizes operations, trains its staff and follows standard operating procedures, it can expect to make a profit. If the other has operational inefficiencies, labor problems and other setbacks, it could lose money. The airplane is identical, but the outcome is not. Carr is correct in that there have been some huge IT outlays of dubious value. But to say that IT is simply the procurement of hardware and software is to be blind to the fact that hardware and software are but two of the myriad components of IT. To use the railroad metaphor, hardware and off-the-shelf software are the rails of IT; how they are designed and implemented is what provides their strategic value. Carr views IT as completely evolved. But the reality is that although IT has matured, it still is in a growth mode. The IT of today is vastly different from the IT of both 1999 and 2009. Carr's view that most innovations within IT will tend to enhance the reliability and efficiency of IT rather than provide a competitive advantage is in direct opposition to what is said by every CIO I have met.
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