I got into technology value creation exactly 19 years ago. I still remember how it happened. I read an article in the Harvard Business Review that made me question everything I was doing as a software executive. It was an article by Nick Carr, titled “IT doesn’t matter”.
The article claimed that technology added no value. Or specifically, technology didn’t create any strategic advantage. Why? Because technology was everywhere, cheap and available to anyone who wanted it.
I disagreed with the article and wanted to do something about it. So I spent almost 20 years trying to prove the author wrong. In some ways he was right and in many ways he was wrong. No matter what, a single article changed everything I ended up doing for a living and made me obsessed about the value technology can create. Here's what happened.