Bi-Modal IT: Running an IT Organization with a Split Personality

Many IT departments are living in two different worlds.  One is a very agile one and is quick to respond to trends in big data, analytics, cloud and mobile.  The other is more antiquated and revolves around the day-to-day maintenance of legacy IT offerings.  The work in the two IT worlds differ significantly.  Agile IT has frequent rollouts and swaps out technologies as they evolve.  Traditional IT has long-term schedules and is very risk adverse in moving forward.  Gartner refers to this sort of IT split personality as ‘bi-modal IT‘.

Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner, said that “CIOs can’t transform their old IT organization into a digital startup, but they can turn it into a bi-modal IT organization.  Forty-five percent of CIOs state they currently have a fast mode of operation, and we predict that 75 percent of IT organizations will be bi-modal in some way by 2017.”

Daryl Plummer, managing vice president and Gartner Fellow, said “in digital business, you must change your relationship with risk. Digital risk is not something to mitigate. Instead, embrace risk. Risk is a conscious leadership decision.  Treat your ability to manage specific risks as a competency and capability. Focus, so you can see what risks are worth taking. Accepting risk is okay; ignoring risk is tragic.”

Not everybody buys Gartner’s advise to businesses to try to split up their organizations.

For example, Simon Wardley, researcher for the Leading Edge Forum, said that “let me just reiterate that point. I’m telling you from the experience of having used both bimodal and trimodal forms over the last decade that bimodal is not what you want to do.”

Jason Bloomberg, industry analyst, echoed the same sentiment saying that “Bimodal IT is simply an excuse to keep doing IT poorly… The business world is in a perennial state of flux, and the ever-increasing sophistication of technology is only accelerating the velocity and diversity of such change. Transformation is all around us – even in the dusty old data centers filled with ancient legacy monoliths…  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! ”