Abstract
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...