6 Reasons Bimodal IT Is Wrong For You
Bimodal IT is supposed to stabilize critical systems and bring innovation to others. But there are consequences to dividing the IT house -- ones most companies don't need.
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A couple of years ago, the good folks at Gartner unleashed a new label on the world of enterprise IT -- Bimodal IT. The research firm defined it like this:
Bimodal IT is the practice of managing two separate, coherent modes of IT delivery, one focused on stability and the other on agility. Mode 1 is traditional and sequential, emphasizing safety and accuracy. Mode 2 is exploratory and nonlinear, emphasizing agility and speed. Bimodal IT is the only sustainable solution for businesses in an increasingly disruptive digital world.
Some companies eagerly embraced bimodal IT as a way of having their cake and eating it, too. These organizations were happy to let non-essential systems showcase agility and innovation while they left their legacy systems untouched in the data center. It's a system that is perfect for staying comfortable. The thing is, it's a system that's much less than perfect for staying competitive.
Thousands of words have been written both attacking and in defense of bimodal IT. I can't say that I've read them all, but I've read many of them, and I'm far more convinced by the arguments of those who are skeptical of bimodal's benefits.
Looking around at the arguments, I think the strongest ones boil down to six points, any one of which should be enough to give an IT manager pause.
[See Agile vs. DevOps: 10 Ways They're Different.]
Now, it's important to say that many of the characteristics bimodal IT promotes are virtues. Critical systems must, in fact, be stable and reliable. Customer-facing systems should be able to react to customer demand quickly. Problems arise when you say, essentially, that the two characteristics are mutually exclusive and demand different systems in support.
So, here are six reasons to stop and give serious thought to your plans before you embrace bimodal IT. I'm curious about your thoughts, though. Do you agree with Gartner that bimodal IT is the only sustainable model for a fast-paced world?
Is your experience that agile development and mainframes go together like sushi and chocolate pudding? Let me know what you think -- and whether you agree with the six reasons to leave bimodal behind.
One of the reasons that so many companies initially embraced bimodal IT is that it gave them the idea that it was OK to keep doing things the way they've always been done. That is, let the folks in short-sleeved white shirts (pocket protectors optional) keep running the big iron in the data center while the flannel-clad hipsters take care of the apps and cloud services. You could almost hear the sighs of relief rising from data centers around the world.
The problem with that reassurance is that it assumes that, in the words of The Lego Movie, everything is awesome. For most of us, while everything might be awesome right now, today's awesome is tomorrow's hopelessly out of date. The urgency of transformation in backend systems is no less than that for apps. The false sense of security that stasis brings can be dangerous when it becomes obvious that you should have updated your systems yesterday.
Bimodal IT assumes that quality is demonstrated in stability, and that stability cannot be achieved in an agile, dynamic development methodology. By setting quality and agility as opposing qualities, bimodal thinking almost guarantees that it will be more difficult to achieve both within the same organization, because it implicitly says that you shouldn't expect both as a result of a single development and management methodology.
That's a shame, because there are many companies that have managed to maintain reliability and operational stability while undergoing digital transformation. It's been demonstrated that there's nothing magic in the waterfall methodology -- as there's nothing truly magical about agile. What is magical is the amount of confusion that maintaining multiple disciplines can bring, and that brings us to the next point. When you assume that you must maintain and manage multiple disciplines, it makes life far more complicated for IT management.
Managing modern IT is a juggling act, though, to stretch the analogy to the breaking point, it's like juggling a bunch of cats of varying sizes and aggression levels. When you go to a bimodal model, it's suddenly like trying to juggle cats and dogs, none of which like one another and all of which hate you.
Leaving the management philosophies aside for a moment, bimodal IT guarantees multiple tool sets, communications media, meeting styles, and everything else. It's not just like trying to manage two baseball teams. It's like having a single manager for a baseball team and a water polo team. There are just too many differences to make it possible to do both well.
You can say that bimodal IT is a solution for companies large enough to have multiple IT teams anyway. But the fact is that radically different development and operational philosophies for the two sides of the IT shop mean that you'll have trouble moving people from one team to another. There will also be trouble at the points where the two teams intersect, and trouble making sure that everyone is working toward the same goals. All that trouble is far more complication than any IT executive staff needs.
This one seems obvious, but it bears explicitly stating: Bimodal IT means that you must have a staff for mode 1 and a separate staff for mode 2. In general, never the staffs shall meet. That means that many of the efficiencies that your colleagues have been talking about when they describe agile teams and DevOps won't be available to you. There will necessarily be duplication and redundancy between the two sides and there's no really good way around that.
There are many IT managers who have said that the cloud has ushered in the era of the IT generalist, the professional who has broad knowledge across the field, even though she or he might have more detailed knowledge in one specific area or another.
Bimodal IT limits the extent to which generalists can work across the entire organization, keeping them largely locked in one silo or another. There are more silos out there, as well, for operations, versus development, versus maintenance on each side. Before you know it, you've got more silos than a Wisconsin dairy farm and all the flexibility that goes with the array of silos. Congratulations.
Remember the whole "everything is awesome" thing a few pages back? Many bimodal IT practitioners believe that their backend systems not only are awesome but will retain their awesomeness as long as no one tries to make them change. That lack of change -- not just a lack of urgency, but a structural lack of willingness to change -- is perhaps the largest issue with mode 1 in bimodal IT.
The argument can be made that backend systems don't need to evolve at the same rate as those customer-facing mode 2 systems. It can't be argued, though, that most companies are continually changing the systems, end-to-end, to meet the evolving needs of the organization and its users. To the extent that bimodal IT discourages companies from transforming their mission-critical systems it does a disservice to the IT department. Whether you're using agile, waterfall, or some other development framework you need to have the mindset of transformation active in IT from front-end all the way to the backend.
The reasons that you need to transform the IT systems come from the business units. IT must be responsive to those business units and partner with them. Bimodal IT is a model that focuses on the needs of the IT group and in doing so, it can lead IT managers to place IT's needs over those of the business -- as sure a recipe for disaster as exists in the world of enterprise IT.
Listen to successful CIOs and they all say that modern IT is all about adding value to business processes. If you're not adding value, then you're just an expense -- and much of the conversation around mode 1 IT is all about managing expenses rather than adding value. Today's IT department should have one mode -- a value-adding mode -- rather than any number of modes focused on other things.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with making sure that critical systems are available and functioning correctly every single time they're called upon. That should be part of the operational mission of the entire IT department. But that's just the point. It should be the mission of the entire department, as innovation and business agility should be the mission of the entire department.
I've shown my operational bias in this article and I'd love to know yours. Have you found that bimodal IT is the model that keeps your IT running smoothly and your internal business customers happy? If so, I'd be happy to hear arguments about why I'm wrong. Whether you agree with me or not, I'd like to hear from you -- meet me in the comments section for the conversation.
The reasons that you need to transform the IT systems come from the business units. IT must be responsive to those business units and partner with them. Bimodal IT is a model that focuses on the needs of the IT group and in doing so, it can lead IT managers to place IT's needs over those of the business -- as sure a recipe for disaster as exists in the world of enterprise IT.
Listen to successful CIOs and they all say that modern IT is all about adding value to business processes. If you're not adding value, then you're just an expense -- and much of the conversation around mode 1 IT is all about managing expenses rather than adding value. Today's IT department should have one mode -- a value-adding mode -- rather than any number of modes focused on other things.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with making sure that critical systems are available and functioning correctly every single time they're called upon. That should be part of the operational mission of the entire IT department. But that's just the point. It should be the mission of the entire department, as innovation and business agility should be the mission of the entire department.
I've shown my operational bias in this article and I'd love to know yours. Have you found that bimodal IT is the model that keeps your IT running smoothly and your internal business customers happy? If so, I'd be happy to hear arguments about why I'm wrong. Whether you agree with me or not, I'd like to hear from you -- meet me in the comments section for the conversation.
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