IT is a critical component of modern organizations, and similar to other areas of business, has adopted multiple cloud applications to automate and streamline business processes and deliver greater efficiency. It's always a challenge balancing resources and investment dollars to walk the line between keeping the core legacy systems up and running while still integrating new technologies to keep the business agile and competitive. Last year, Gartner coined a new term -- bimodal IT -- to describe an organizational model that enterprise IT organizations take with regard to their technology infrastructure and innovation. It describes two kinds of approaches:
- Mode 1 is focused on stability and efficiency. It's a deliberate, consensus-driven, and slow moving process and often involves technology core to the business.
- Mode 2 is experimental, agile, less risk averse, and fast-to-market. Type 2 technologies are often business applications, but they can be core technologies as well.
IT Business Edge recently spoke with Simon King, senior director of product marketing and strategy at Numerify, on how these agile companies will succeed using the Type 2 approach, where legacy-entrenched enterprises will not. In this slideshow, he discusses how enterprise IT leaders can approach infrastructure and innovation, as the role of IT continues to evolve, to maintain a competitive advantage.
Things to consider
Central to the Bimodal IT canard is a false dichotomy between traditional/slow IT (what Gartner calls mode-1) and agile/innovative IT (predictably, mode-2). The false assumption here is that the only way to deal with traditional, slow IT is to transform it suddenly in some kind of big bang, high risk, expensive endeavor. Run everyone through a high intensity Agile/DevOps course and surprise! You’ve just switched from slow to Agile. And since we don’t want to do that, better to leave well enough alone.
However, the entire notion of big bang change actually contradicts the Agile way of thinking, which recommends iterative, customer-focused changes rather than pre-planned, all-or-nothing types of transformation.
Furthermore, there is no black and white distinction between the two modes of IT, simply because the business doesn’t require two distinct modes. Instead, when the business faces disruptive business agility drivers, those drivers lead both to the self-organizing, cross-organizational teams that characterize the agile/innovative mode-2 as well as the transformation of traditional IT – but in a step-by-step, business-driven fashion.
Fundamentally, Bimodal IT recommends maintaining your organizational silos, which is contrary to the entire notion of business transformation. True, I advise executives to know when to optimize, and know when to disrupt – but not in separate silos! There are roles both for optimization as well as disruption-driven innovation in both agile/innovative IT as well as slow/traditional IT, even though the specific optimization and innovation activities will largely be different across the larger organization.
Source:
IT Business Edge
Intellyx
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