In small businesses and organizations with either internal or outsourced IT services, there are three approaches or states of dealing with IT. In the first state, only basic IT service is done to maintain the status quo. The second state consists of looking at business processes and finding ways to make them more efficient or effective using information technology. The highest level state of IT management looks at the business and comes up opportunities to offer real competitive advantage through new ideas, new services, and new products.

Following the concept of the Capability Maturity Model (Wikipedia) for software development, I am going to give a label to each of these stages. In the simplest IT service state, things are very much in a Basic management state. If a printer breaks, it gets fixed. If someone needs an update made to the website, IT makes the change. In general if something is broken, it gets fixed, and that's about the only time something is done. When IT management is done to improve the operations of the business, the IT services are Optimizing the functioning of the organization to improve efficiency or sometimes to increase automation. When IT is able to be utilized at a higher level, it is able to see business opportunities and capitalize on them. At that point, IT becomes Innovating and can bring new possibilities and competitive advantage to the organization.