About four years ago, a guy wrote an article in the house publication of Harvard Business
School—the Harvard Business Review—called “IT Doesn’t Matter,” which really captured the
spirit of the post dot-com era, and the pessimism that went along with it. It essentially said,
“Look, we’re spending huge amounts of money on what is essentially a utility. It’s like
electricity, it’s like water, it’s like toner paper, or paper clips.” It’s good, right? We like this
stuff. It’s actually useful input to your business. But we all can buy it, we all have access to
it. It’s getting cheaper all the time, we’re not writing it ourselves, we’re buying it off the
shelf. Everyone can buy the same stuff off the shelf. As a result, none of us are getting
ahead of anyone else, and we’re in this massive spending frenzy in an arms race that’s not
getting anyone anything important.
So he made a very strong argument and he got beat up for it, like you can imagine. My
colleagues and I were doing most of the lumping. But he actually made a couple of pretty
interesting points. If this stuff is universally easy to come by, it’s not a really good place to
go look for competitive advantage. We hope you all learned that while you were here.
So he put the challenge out there to go articulate what’s going on. Does IT matter? If it
doesn’t, why on earth are we spending, on average, 5 percent of revenue inside big
companies on it? This is a fairly deep puzzle.
So one of the things that we get to do at HBS when we’re confronted with a puzzle like this
is to go out and talk to companies and write cases, and learn about the phenomenon by
immersing yourself in it. So that’s what I’ve been doing for a while. And I want us to start to
get toward an answer to this question by telling you three stories, three cases that I’ve
written in recent years. And it’s pretty clear that if you want to understand the impact of IT,
you go watch a motorcycle race, right?