Meta IT: Strategy framework for change

Meta-IT represents a new IT management framework and governance packaged into a set of results-oriented best practices

Most organizations today continue to view technology as merely a back-office cost center, a viewpoint that diminishes the breadth of IT's impact on a firm's competitive profile. To contribute to strategic growth, IT's role has to be understood as far more than a repository of software and hardware applications. Instead, it should be seen from a meta-IT perspective, a perception that examines and understands the management of IT as a firm-wide service and infrastructure fabric that collaborates with business units to respond rapidly, innovatively, and cost effectively to changing market conditions.

Traditional IT strategy and governance models fail because they do not take into account the changing needs of the markets in which businesses operate and the new technologies that are now available to expedite and facilitate IT management. The strategy to fill this void is the concept of a meta-IT model in which IT is positioned as complementary to other strategies of attaining greater market agility.

Meta-IT represents a new IT management framework and governance packaged into a set of results-oriented best practices. Even though it is vendor neutral, it is not divorced from the technological capabilities that make management more effective. The fundamental premise of the meta-IT model is that IT management must be viewed holistically from the enterprise level, abstracted away from the conglomeration of software and hardware components. In other words, IT has to be viewed as more than the sum of its parts.

In his definitive paper "What Is Strategy?" Michael Porter highlighted that competitive advantage is a consequence of differentiating strategies, not operational effectiveness:

"Operational effectiveness (OE) means performing similar activities better than rivals perform them. Operational effectiveness includes but is not limited to efficiency. It refers to any number of practices that allow a company to better utilize its inputs, by for example, reducing defects in products or developing better products faster. In contrast, strategic positioning means performing different activities from rivals' or performing similar activities in different ways."

Differentiation stems from making unique choices both in firm activities and in how the firm performs those activities. Firms must make certain choices vis-à-vis IT as well — choices that include but are not limited to software and hardware decisions. The only way to end this cycle is to transform IT from service provider to strategic partner using a meta-IT approach.

Meta-IT can be achieved through a set of systematically institutionalized practices: