Welcome to the SloanSelect "What Is To Become of IT?" Collection from MIT Sloan Management Review

Can't anyone find anything good to say about corporate IT? Its merits have been much debated in MIT SMR, especially since Andrew McAfee's 2004 article, "Do You Have Too Much IT?". We've gathered the best volleys in the argument into a new collection that offers quite different perspectives on the proper place of IT in the corporate spectrum.

Purchase the entire SloanSelect Collection at a 17% discount , or choose individual articles. Click here for ordering instructions

Collection Contents

Do You Have Too Much IT? Want to move away from massive, fear-driven IT investments? Consider Andrew McAfee's example of Spanish clothing company Inditex. Its experience demonstrates that it is possible to select, adopt and leverage IT masterfully while spending very little on it. Read more.

Nick Carr's seminal article, "The End of Corporate Computing," generated debate that continues to this day. His premise: IT's shift from an in-house capital asset to a centralized, commoditized utility service will overturn strategic and operating assumptions, alter industrial economics, upset markets and pose daunting challenges to every user and vendor. Read more.

When Andrew McAfee coined the term Enterprise 2.0 in MIT SMR, tools like blogs, wikis and group messaging had begun to take hold as tools for corporate communications. "Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration" saw the future in these tools and alerted managers to their power for both good and bad. Read more.

As something of a rebuttal to Carr's article, "Finishing Off IT" makes the case for the strategic benefit of maintaining some corporate IT infrastructure, while acknowledging that the commoditization of IT has indeed changed how executives view its place in their companies. Read more.

Cynthia Rettig's "The Trouble With Enterprise Software" stirred up much discussion in the blogosphere when it was published in 2007. She argues that enterprise systems that were supposed to streamline and simplify business processes instead have brought high risks, uncertainty and a deeply worrying level of complexity. Read more.

Merely aligning IT activities with business priorities will not solve a company's technology problems. "Avoiding the Alignment Trap in IT" explains that there must first be simplicity, efficiency and accountability in IT units before alignment can fulfill its promise. Read more.

Ordering Instructions

$	32.50	Buy the SloanSelect collection as PDFs
$	32.50	Buy the SloanSelect collection as Paper Reprints (shipping charges will apply)
Be sure to include coupon code IT208 to receive the $6.50 discount off the standard rate. To purchase an individual article, click on the "read more" link for that article, then follow the "buy this article" link. Note: Coupon only applicable on purchases of the entire collection — not on individual articles. You may also purchase permission to reproduce any of our articles. Click on each article's title to select permission to copy and enter the appropriate quantity in your shopping cart.

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