A recent article in the Harvard Business Review carried the intriguing headline, “IT Doesn’t Matter.”

The IT in the title refers to information technology. The author’s premise is that the rapid spread of computer technology over the past few decades has made most significant IT tools — and even business processes — so commonly available they no longer provide a company with any strategic advantage.

Rather, author Nicholas G. Carr says that many of the most routinely used computerized technologies, such as e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets and Web browsing, have become “infrastructure technologies” much as railways and the electric utility grid became part of our infrastructure in the past 200 years.

With such infrastructures, the most important goals are making sure that your supply is not interrupted and that your cost is low.

I say that IT is as strategic as it ever was. The question is, what are your company’s key strategies and how can IT support them? Corporate strategy defines how a company can thrive in its environment, differentiating itself from competitors and serving customers at a profit.

Some companies compete by paying rigorous attention to cost. That allows them to sell profitably their product or service at the lowest cost. Companies that expect to command higher prices must be able to differentiate themselves in other ways, such as by providing more innovative and engaging products or outstanding customer service.

Supporting all themes

Technology investment can be deployed to support all of these key strategic themes to help a company achieve a competitive advantage. But if your task is to select, approve or deploy that technology, you should be able to clearly identify your firm’s key strategies and understand how a particular technology investment will support them. If you don’t know those strategies, you can’t do your best job.

Whether you are a technician evaluating details of products before purchase, a manager evaluating a capital budget request or a publisher charting the direction for your whole newspaper, it’s important to consider technology investment in the context of the “big picture.”

That will help you ask the right questions before you spend money. More important, it can open your eyes to new opportunities that fit with your strategy and distinguish your company from its competition.

If you are replacing or introducing a new system, consider: What will this new system or tool help your company accomplish? Why do you need it? Will it lower your costs? Improve quality? Help you produce or deliver your product faster? How will it do these things?

Is this a replacement system or a new system? If it’s a replacement, why get rid of the old system? Reliability? Maintenance costs? Features? These are all valid reasons. A comprehensive “cost of poor quality” assessment of a system would include the cost of downtime and system failure, the cost of maintaining systems (which can be quite high with aging systems that may require one or more full-time employees just to keep them running), and the cost of other employees’ labor to perform tasks that could reasonably be expected to be automated, given a newer system.

New service?

Perhaps the proposed technology allows your company to deliver a whole new product or service, deliver an existing product in a different way or improve customer service.

How does that fit into your company’s strategic positioning, its unique identity that helps define the company in its market?

Given the changes in the tools available and the competitive market of newspapers, it’s sometimes not desirable or even possible to exactly replace an old system with a new one.

Some examples: If you are replacing your newspaper’s editorial system, look at adding a content management system that makes Web publishing easier too. This can let you create new products, add revenues and cut costs. Consider the possibility that you’ll be gathering and editing news for broadcast distribution soon.

Consider new software

If you are replacing or upgrading an e-mail system, consider using the new software to send targeted newsletters to subscribers. That approach can yield more ad revenues. Additionally, e-mail marketing might help replace lost marketing opportunities as “no-call” legislation expands nationwide.

Regardless if you’re replacing your software or computer systems, think about how the Web can give your employees and customers easier access to tools and services.

The Internet can automate many operations, from receiving ad content to allowing employees to monitor their vacation days. These types of Web tools can save costs, improve quality and reduce the time now devoted to completing these tasks. While it’s not likely you are looking at new computer systems to streamline all of your operations, which ones are the most strategic for your company right now?

Tom Arnold is a partner of Summit Media Partners LLC (summitmediapartners.com). He has worked extensively with newspapers in the areas of process improvement, activity-based costing, cost of quality, operational measurements, IT systems and cross-functional teams. He can be contacted at tarnold@smpllc.com.