I attended an SAP customer roundtable in Boston earlier this week. In the opening remarks, Rob Enslin, president of SAP North America, asked the question, “IT, does it matter?”

That old question again? Nicholas Carr’s 2003 Harvard Business Review article stated plainly that “IT Doesn’t Matter.” That certainly stirred up some controversy in the technology community — mainly among vendors touting IT tools. But I thought Carr had some valid points. As noted in a later MA article, he likened IT to infrastructure, and said it would evolve to the point of being a reliable utility that’s as easy to flick on as a light switch.

Isn’t his prediction coming true? Witness cloud computing, software-as-a-service, and server virtualization. We may not be completely there yet, but in The Big Switch, Carr’s latest book, he points out that the World Wide Web is turning into the World Wide Computer, with all manner of applications hooked into the Internet’s global computing grid.

Here’s where the controversy comes in. Carr has claimed that because IT is starting to migrate into the same category as electricity, IT is just a part of doing business and does not offer a company any competitive advantage.

That’s where I disagree. I think IT does matter, for exactly the reasons that Carr says it doesn’t.

As IT becomes infrastructure, it also becomes invisible and reliable. For that reason, it is making a huge difference within organizations that need to concentrate on core business processes rather than worry about keeping networks, servers, and enterprise applications running.

Take Raytheon, which recently announced its fiscal second quarter. Sales were up a slight 4%, but income from continuing operations was up 17% year-over-year. That’s no small feat in today’s economy. What made a big difference in Raytheon’s financial health was the CFO’s call to action several years ago demanding that the company leverage a standard IT infrastructure to pull together what was then a non-integrated, disjointed organization. “IT weaved systems and processes together, enabling us to react to the market,” said Lesley Dickie, director of Raytheon’s Corporate IT SAP Competency Center, at this week’s SAP event.

Similarly, Anthony Bosco, CIO of engineering services firm Day & Zimmermann, said, “IT matters to us. It is crucial to having a sustainable business.” And, he said, because the firm offers services that require finding the right person at the right time and the right price, IT — in the form of standardized systems and enterprise applications around the globe — is the reason Day & Zimmermann can quickly and easily coordinate projects and track talent. “It is directly tied to creating value for the customer,” Bosco said.

In essence, a strong IT backbone is helping Raytheon, Day & Zimmermann, and others ride out the current economic storm.

If the IT infrastructure — be it servers behind the firewall or in the cloud — enables some companies to survive while others crumble under market pressure, I would call that a competitive advantage. So, I say, IT does matter.

What do you think?