Adapting IT management for Effective IT strategy leadership

This article argues that the lack of consistent information technology (IT) and organisational strategies heightens the proclivity to cancel IT initiatives. Organisational strategy loosely conveys a compounded perspective pertaining to business and organisational strategies. The combination of these strategies logically hinge on efficient enterprise IT integration concepts contextualising conceptual links between their respective architectures to best suit prevailing business and socioeconomic needs. However, an effective socioeconomy demands contextual strategic management of IT, aligned with geopolitical and other factors affecting the nature of IT, to optimise the applied context of principles of governance and management. Strategic management of IT is alleviated by the concept of levels of abstraction inherent in the principle of separation of concerns. Hence the strategic use of the concept in 'opinion' formulation within the paradigm of a sociotechnical system design, development and management. Accordingly, optimal business performance demands that business and IT leadership and management develop mechanisms to establish symbiosis between governance and management principles, glued together by an adaptive enterprise-wide standard architecture. There is therefore a contended need to integrate IT, processes and strategies. This demands that business and IT professionals possess an interdisciplinary and a multidisciplinary set of competencies. The perceived set of competencies supposedly help professionals to effectively navigate the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary nature of information technology management (ITM). Thus the ensuing sociotechnical system constructs represent the challenge imposed by the journey to purposefully adapt ITM for effective IT strategy leadership for a competitive economic system. The research used an advanced mixed research methodology embedding quantitative methods in a qualitative study. This was balanced by deontological and teleological philosophies underlining a systemic approach aimed at optimising similarly credible research findings as well as provide a realistic perspective. Consequently, analysis employs an approach based on four contextual themes, viz. administrative, investment management, management and technology practices and a closing perspective, in deliberate efforts to optimise triangulation. The outcome is an adaptive ITM process model facilitating discovery, construction, governance and management of a purposeful sociotechnical system in any given geopolitical context. The model can benefit academics and practitioners in their quests to contextualise philosophies and concretise processes sustaining purposeful sociotechnical systems. In principle, the research introduces a general theory of collaboration thriving on ITM as the art, philosophy and science of orchestrating strategic management principles to enliven the value of IT in pursuit of an optimum strategic intent in a continuum.