Information Technology Infrastructure (ITI)

IT infrastructure is a major business resource and a source for attaining sustainable competitive advantage (Broadbent et al., 1999; Keen, 1991; McKenney, 1995). It is increasingly seen as a fundamental differentiator in the competitive performance of the organizations, its investment leads to new competitive strategies and progression through higher levels of organizational transformation. IT infrastructure capabilities enable the emergence of new organization forms, facilitate electronic commerce and knowledge management; it is critical to globally competing firms (Broadbent et al., 1999). Strategically, the importance of an organization's information technology infrastructure capability is increasingly recognized as critical to an organization's competitiveness. These infrastructures are important for organizations going through dynamic change, for organizations reengineering their business processes, managing individual and organizational knowledge and for those with multiple business units or extensive international or geographically dispersed operations (Broadbent et al. 1999). IT infrastructure, according to Broadbent and Weill (1997) is the base foundation of information technology capability, delivered as reliable services shared throughout the firm. ITI is coordinated centrally, usually by the information systems group or external people when outsourced. They use a pyramid to illustrate the different components of information technology infrastructure (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Elements of IT infrastructure (Broadbent and Weill, 1997)

At the base of the pyramid there are components such as computer and communications technologies (hardware and software), that are largely commodities and readily available for purchase and hire. The second layer comprises of a set of shared services such as management of large-scale data processing, provision of electronic data interchange (EDI) capability, groupware, Internet or management of firm-wide databases. The human resources turn the components into reliable, shared information technology infrastructure services. Each of these components could be outsourced completely or in part, the decision depends on the factors already described above.

They also identified four views of IT infrastructure with different benefits and investments: none, utility, dependent, and enabling. None view implies that an organization does not invest in IT infrastructure at a firmwide level. The utility view primarily considers investment in IT infrastructure as a way to reduce costs through economies of scale. The dependent view ties the investment in IT infrastructure to the current organizational strategies and the enabling view is a dependent view with extra investment to cater for long-term goals and developments (Broadbent and Weill, 1997). It has earlier been recognized that ITI can be a significant barrier or enabler in the practical options available to planning and changing organization processes like KM (Broadbent et al., 1999), thus adequate support of enabling technologies and platforms is an important factors in the success of organizational changes. Therefore, organizations that consider IT as part of their core strategies are likely to take the dependent and/or enabling views. On the other hand, while organizations that consider IT as operational tools are likely to take the none and /or utility view, thus, they are likely to outsource their IT without fear of losing knowledge and have more time to concentrate on core capabilities.