Enormous expenditures on information technology (IT) by US corporations in the last 20 years have been based on a critical assumption: that information technology is increasingly important to competitive advantage and strategic success. Nicholas G. Carr calls this common wisdom into question in his new book Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage.

Carr notes in his book that ". . . the fragmented healthcare industry, shielded from competition, has been relatively slow to adopt IT, despite its complex information- and transaction processing requirements. Today, therefore, IT continues to hold considerably more potential for providing competitive advantage for healthcare providers than it does for financial institutions."