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Where is Information Technology Heading?
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Where is Information Technology Heading? The role of Information Technology (IT) in business has changed from the first emergence of the field to present time. Companies throughout the world are faced with the dilemma of where IT is headed and particularly where it is headed within their organization. There are two extreme answers to this problem: 1) IT is losing its “it” factor (no pun intended) and is becoming an every day infrastructural technology that holds no strategic value and 2) IT is at a pinnacle point in the business arena where it could be influential - if structured well - in a company “making it.” So, who’s right? In the articles “IT Doesn’t Matter” and “Your Next IT Strategy,” two authors make their cases. Throughout teachings of business, one is reminded of how maintaining a competitive advantage over your competitors leads to a successful product and in turn a successful business. In “IT Doesn’t Matter,” author Nicholas G. Carr takes the position (as could be guessed from the title) that IT no longer has that advantage and really doesn’t matter. The article talks of IT having the telltale characteristics of an infrastructural technology that has reshaped an industry (“from the steam engine and the railroad to the telegraph and the telephone to the electric generator and the internal combustion engine”). As described in the paper, infrastructural technologies are those technologies that at one point could have been considered competitive advantages for certain organizations, but have over time become available to all, thus losing their differentiation qualities. This is exactly what seems to be happening to IT. Carr gives four reasons why becoming an infrastructural technology is IT’s destiny: it is a transport mechanism – it carries digital information just as railroads carry goods and power grids carry electricity -, it is highly replicable, the internet has provided a perfect delivery channel for generic applications, and it is subject to rapid price deflation.
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