Part 1 (Reflection):
Two articles that resonated with me this semester were “IT Doesn’t Matter” by Nicolas Carr and
“How Information Gives You Competitive Advantage” by Michael Porter.
Porter’s article, written in 1985, identifies a change in the role of IT in business at that time that
was creating a fundamentally different business environment which would alter the competitive
positions of all companies. Porter’s position is that investment in information systems allows
companies to outperform their rivals by offering ways of lowering costs, enhancing
differentiation and changing the competitive scope of a company. These advantages are achieved
by optimizing value chain activities and exploiting linkages between the activities to align with
the company’s strategic focus and IS helps to gather and interpret the information needed to
evaluate these potential changes and improvements.
Porter has a more “textbook” view that IS and IT are important all by themselves. Porter’s entire
article revolves around the idea that IS can be used to lower cost and enhance differentiation to
gain competitive advantage. Porters Five Forces model brings up the idea that while IS can
increase a company’s ease, effectiveness, and efficiency of doing business, it can also easily
increase the threat from competitors who are harnessing the same IS, and dramatically increase
the rate at which a business can fall behind and lose market share. It seems all five pillars of
Porter’s Five Forces are susceptible to drastic increases in threat from competitive IT advantages.
Carr argues that the opportunity for a single company to benefit by leveraging IT have
diminished since the time Porter’s article was written due to commoditization. With the benefit
of hindsight, we can see that Carr (writing in 2003) was correct about the commoditization of
