IT and Business Meet

Just found this article over at the McKinsey Quarterly website about IT as a commodity. I wish I found it days sooner! The authors seem to share the same perspective as me, based upon my comments published in IT as Change. Below is an excerpt from McKinsey's article Where IT Infrastructure and Business Strategy Meet that I found very true:

Yet the very ubiquity of these computing, storage, and networking technologies makes some executives regard IT infrastructure as a commodity. That’s a mistake. Yes, components such as servers and storage—even some support processes, like the monitoring of applications—have been commoditized. Even so, an effective infrastructure operation creates value by making sound choices about which technologies to use and how to integrate them. A technology product purchased from a vendor may be a commodity, but the ability to bring together hardware, software, and support to provide the right combination of cost, resiliency, and features for a new application isn’t.