Has It Has Reached the Winter of Its Life as an Enabler of Competitive Advantage?

Has IT has reached the Winter of its life as an enabler of competitive advantage? Or is it Springtime, the season of growth for forward-thinking companies?

From the authors of the business bestseller Business Process Management: The Third Wave, read Howard Smith and Peter Fingar's critical analysis of Nicholas Carr's IT article in the Harvard Business Review.

"Smith and Fingar present a provocative summary of today's debate over whether IT has become a sunset industry" -- Leslie Walker, Washington Post, Sunday, August 17, 2003; Page F03

"Howard Smith and Peter Fingar ... argue that Carr is not only wrong but dangerous. They remind us of what happened when Harvard Business Review published Michael Hammer's 1990 article "Reengineering Work." Too many Harvard MBAs decided to take the easy part of Hammer's advice and downsized their companies to death. Unless Carr's argument is debunked, the current crop of reigning MBAs will be tempted to run WordPerfect on mid-1980s PCs connected to IBM 360 mainframes." -- Robert M. Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com, from his article "IT Matters", MIT Technology Review, June 2004

Has IT has reached the Winter of its life as an enabler of competitive advantage? Or is it Springtime, the season of growth for forward-thinking companies?

From the authors of the business bestseller Business Process Management: The Third Wave, read Howard Smith and Peter Fingar's critical analysis of Nicholas Carr's IT article in the Harvard Business Review.

"Smith and Fingar present a provocative summary of today's debate over whether IT has become a sunset industry" -- Leslie Walker, Washington Post, Sunday, August 17, 2003; Page F03

"Howard Smith and Peter Fingar ... argue that Carr is not only wrong but dangerous. They remind us of what happened when Harvard Business Review published Michael Hammer's 1990 article "Reengineering Work." Too many Harvard MBAs decided to take the easy part of Hammer's advice and downsized their companies to death. Unless Carr's argument is debunked, the current crop of reigning MBAs will be tempted to run WordPerfect on mid-1980s PCs connected to IBM 360 mainframes." -- Robert M. Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com, from his article "IT Matters", MIT Technology Review, June 2004

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