Nicholas G. Carr is an independent writer, consultant and former member of the Harvard Business Review editorial staff who penned the article that has stirred much debate in business and technology circles. If you haven't read the article we encourage you to obtain a copy. It can be obtained from HBR or from Amazon.com.

It is important that you read his thesis in full, for it is compelling, yet we are firmly of the opinion that his conclusions are wrong. We form that judgment based on our own research both before and after the publication of Carr's article and on the basis of the content of numerous rebuttals to Carr from around the world, which we have identified and collected here in order to construct and expand our critical analysis.

His analysis has clearly identified an Achilles' heel in the IT industry, and it is this: Carr argues that technology's potential for differentiating one company from the pack--its strate-gic potential--inexorably diminishes as it becomes accessible and affordable to all. Thomas Stewart, writing in the introduction to a series of "Letters to the Editor" following publication of Carr's article, states, "The most common misperception [of Carr's ideas] is that the article says that IT is dead and that it will not continue to be a source of dramatic, even transformational change. It doesn't say that. Instead, it says the odds are that the benefits of such changes will inure to whole industries, rather than any one competitor."

Stewart's interpretation of Carr's argument lies at the heart of our analysis also, for we argue here, and in our previous work, that changes in technology itself are now able to address the management of a company's unique, differentiated business processes, and do so in a manner that leads to the exact opposite conclusion to Carr. The benefits of the coming era of process-oriented IT will inure to individual companies and will substantially assist them in dominating the value chains they manage. Indeed, the front cover of our previous work, Business Process Management: The Third Wave, states "The breakthrough that redefines competitive advantage for the next fifty years." Thus, when Carr's article appeared in a widely distributed journal such as HBR, we felt compelled to respond.

To provide you a preamble of our critique, and so as not to distort in any way what he has written, here is the essence of Carr's thesis in his own words. "I examine the evolution of information technology in business and show that it follows a pattern strikingly similar to earlier technologies like railroads and electric power. For a brief period, as they are being built into the infrastructure of commerce, these 'infrastructural technologies,' as I call them, open opportunities for forward-looking companies to gain sustainable competitive advantages. But as their availability increases and their cost decreases--as they become ubiquitous--they become commodity inputs. From a strategic standpoint, they become invisible; they no longer matter. … In brief, executives need to shift their attention from IT opportunities to IT risks-from offense to defense."

The following are snippets that we will use to illustrate Carr's specific assertions and upon which we base our analysis in this book. Some will be repeated throughout our work here.

"As IT's power and ubiquity have grown, its strategic importance has diminished."
"What makes a resource truly strategic is not ubiquity, but scarcity. You only gain an edge over rivals by having or doing something that they can't have or do. By now, the core functions of IT--data storage, data processing, and data transport--have become available and affordable to all. Their very power and presence have begun to transform them from potentially strategic resources into commodity factors of production."
"[data storage, data processing, and data transport] are becoming costs of doing business that must be paid by all but provide distinction to none."
"IT is best seen as the latest in a series of broadly adopted technologies that have reshaped industry over the past two centuries-from the steam engine and the railroad to the telegraph and the telephone to the electric generator to the internal combustion engine."
"The buildout [of infrastructural technology] forces users to adopt technical standards, rendering proprietary systems obsolete. Even the way the [infrastructural] technology is used becomes standardized as best practices come to be widely understood and emulated. Often, in fact, the best practices end up being built into the infrastructure itself. ... Both the technology and its modes of use become, in effect, commoditized."
"IT is also highly replicable. Indeed it is hard to imagine a more perfect commodity than a byte of data--endlessly and perfectly reproducible at virtually no cost. The near-infinite scalability of many IT functions, when combined with technical standardization, dooms most proprietary applications to economic obsolescence. Why write your own application ... when you can buy ready-made, state-of-the-art application for a fraction of the cost?"

And Carr's key recommendations drawn from these as-sertions, his "New Rules for IT management," are:
1. "Spend less;
2. Follow, don't lead; and
3. Focus on vulnerabilities, not opportunities."

In the May 12, 2003 issue of ComputerWorld, Carr reasserted his fundamental ideas, "… Companies have increasingly bought into the assumption that IT is a strategic resource. As a result, they have brought in CIOs who are conceptual, strategic thinkers about IT. I think there's less of a need for those types of individuals."