How to end the IT blame game

More than 22 years after journalist Nicholas Carr declared in a controversial Harvard Business Review articlethat IT is a commodity that provides little or no competitive or strategic advantage, the debate over the value of technology is back in the spotlight.

For anyone who has worked in or around IT, it’s a familiar cycle. Only this time it’s fueled not by broadband and ERP systems but by AI, automation, and business leaders who fear being left behind. Opinions today are also muddied by the popular yet mistaken belief that technology, IT, and the IT department are interchangeable and not separate entities.

While Carr’s premise is basically accurate: Companies don’t thrive because of their internet connection, laptop horsepower, or networks, because these are commodities. However, his argument doesn’t consider that companies can also lose their competitive edge without those necessary commodities. Every competitive advantage of the past two decades, from Amazon’s supply chain to Airbnb’s marketplace, was built on top of IT infrastructure that Carr dismissed as strategically irrelevant.

Still, this has not stopped respected thinkers from poking at what many IT professionals consider sacred ground.

In a recent California Management Review article, for example, academics Joe Peppard and Martin Mocker contend that organizations are “safe betting” most AI investments won’t deliver the promised ROI. They point to an IBM study claiming that over the past three years, only 25% of AI initiatives met expectations. Their framing echoes Carr’s opinion that technology, no matter how transformative, won’t guarantee competitive advantage. What’s different today is who is held accountable. In their view, the real shortfall is not with IT but with business leaders who continue to abdicate critical technology decisions to IT, then resent IT for the consequences.

Going a bit deeper, Peppard argues that organizations confuse the IT operating model (how digital assets and workflows run the business) with the IT organizing model (how people with tech knowledge are structured). Many people, both inside and outside tech, believe strategy comes from the business and execution comes from IT, even when 90% of competitive differentiation now is expressed through software, data, and digital workflows. While Carr warned in 2003 that IT was becoming a utility. Peppard points out that treating IT only as a utility ensures it delivers no value beyond utilities.

Distinct IT approaches, similar results

To fully understand this tech conundrum, it is important to realize that IT and tech organizations today essentially exist in two separate but parallel universes. One is populated by large enterprises that struggle with ambiguous technology ownership. Marketing wants agility, finance wants predictability, and operations wants stability. IT is caught in the indistinct crossfire, expected to be innovative yet risk-averse, strategic yet cost-efficient, and fast yet safe. Governance models, vendor complexity, and siloed incentives turn even reasonable initiatives into political marathons.

The result is an enterprise universe whose hallmark is unaccountable business leadership. This is the world Joe Peppard rightly criticizes because no IT department can compensate for leaders who cannot or will not own technology decisions.

In the second IT universe, an SMB world, there are no CIOs defending empires, CFOs blocking innovation, or architecture review committees slowing everything down. Founders and owners make their own technology decisions and are painfully aware of cash flow, customer retention, and growth ambitions. They outsource everything they can, aggressively adopt SaaS options, and do not suffer the slings and arrows of unnecessary IT bureaucracy. And yet, ERP projects still fail, CRM deployments still underdeliver, and integrations still collapse under real-world complexities. The same problems appear, only with different protagonists.

If two universes with opposite governance models experience the same outcomes, the problem can’t be IT. Nor can it be the lack of IT. The heart of the matter is not whether IT exists; it’s whether organizations can access the right capabilities for the job at hand. As Peppard maintains and most SMBs already realize, “keep the lights on” (KLO) commodities like networks, endpoints, identity protocols, backups, and cybersecurity safeguards can be outsourced, automated, standardized, or consumed-as-a-service.

But the capabilities that create business advantage — data strategy, AI readiness, digital product management, operating model redesign, and customer experience transformation — don’t sit naturally inside traditional IT. They require business strategists who understand technology and technologists who understand business.

This is why Peppard calls for embedding tech knowledge throughout the organization, not corralling it into a siloed department. And it’s why traditional IT professionals, who are brilliant at stability, security, and continuity, often struggle when asked to run innovation labs, lead data science teams, or design customer-centric digital experiences. They are different jobs that require different skills, incentives, and operating models.

AI raises the stakes and exposes the gaps

Induced by the enthusiasm of CEOs, many organizations today are rushing into AI in the belief that AI will transform their business. Yet, 60% remain stuck in pilots, according to an IBM Institute for Business Value 2025 CEO study. CDOs cite data quality, governance, and unclear use cases as the primary blockers. None of these are “IT problems.” They are leadership, strategy, and organizational capability problems. When business leaders lack the skills to define AI use cases or evaluate technology investments; the default reaction is predictable: They delegate the decision to IT and complain when IT behaves like IT.

Three shifts are needed to eliminate the disparity, none of which involve getting rid of the IT department, but all involve redefining its purpose:

1. Treat KLO IT as a utility: Operated and considered much like electricity: reliable, efficient, and predictable. Commodity services should be managed, not debated. They provide no advantage, but without them, the business collapses.

2. Build digital and AI capabilities outside traditional IT: Agile product teams, data governance, analytics, and innovation belong where the business model is shaped — much closer to revenue, customer experience, and operations.

3. Make business leaders accountable for technology outcomes: Technology investments are business investments. They should be owned by the business, not assigned to IT as a project delivery exercise. This mirrors Peppard’s call to end the flawed partnership model that positions IT as a supplier instead of a co-architect of value. In SMBs, this accountability already exists. In enterprises, it must be created.

Of course, adopting these changes in attitude don’t guarantee that IT will stop being the department that many people love to hate. IT will still be blamed for failures related to poor process design, weak data governance, unrealistic expectations, and vendor management. It is an easy scapegoat because it is the one place where all these disappointments intersect and where the symptoms become visible, even if the root causes lie elsewhere.

IT hardware and infrastructure are commodities, as Carr maintained in the HBR article more than two decades ago, and Peppard and Mocker are correct in noting that organizing for digital value requires rethinking the role of IT. The underlying truth, however, is that technology doesn’t fail. Rather, organizations fail to build the environment needed to make technology succeed.