From the Washington Post, Sunday, August 17, 2003; Page F03

An article in the Harvard Business Review in May declared that information technology has matured to the point where it no longer gives companies competitive advantages. It raised a minor furor in economic and high-tech circles, and even some calls from Harvard's business school to sever its links to the venerable Business Review. Now comes the book-length rebuttal. In IT Doesn't Matter: Business Processes Do, Howard Smith and Peter Fingar draw the opposite conclusion: The strategic importance of IT is actually increasing as recent software standards such as "Web services" allow companies to innovate the way they do business. While the authors could have spent more time advancing their own thesis about the coming "business process" revolution, they offer a provocative summary of today's debate over whether IT has become a sunset industry. [link]

-- Leslie Walker © 2003 The Washington Post Company

Author response: The new book, IT Doesn't Matter: Business Processes Do, is primarily a response to the Harvard Business Review article. We take care to ensure that our views do not crowd out the opinions of the many who either indirectly or directly contributed to the debate. While we clearly link to the theme of Business Process Management, and provide additional actionable advice to companies wishing to manage their processes using IT, the full story of the BPM breakthrough is described in our previous book, published 2003, Business Process Management: The Third Wave.