Brownfield and Greenfield IT Ops: How Should You Manage Your Crop?

October 1, 2015

By Rob Markovich

Two particular takeaways are worth further discussion here. First is point #1 mentioned above, that one size in cloud doesn’t fit for all applications. Enterprises are confronted with an increasing choice of cloud platforms to deploy their applications (which averages around 100 applications per enterprise in the USA, according to the report). Applications can run on premise in a data center or they can run on top a cloud platform. Of the applications that are running on cloud, the average enterprise is using 4 separate cloud platforms. And this deployment of multi-platform isn’t going to change anytime soon. This increases that need for management tools that can work across platforms – call it a 360- degree view – and helping to pulling it all together into a cohesive whole.

The second notable point is #7, that bimodal IT is hard to do. Bimodal IT been getting recent airplay, a concept introduced by Gartner to advocate organizing and operating brownfield and greenfield separately, bifurcating the IT organization to run at two different speeds. One group is tasked with ‘keeping the lights on’ functions, and the other on ‘business innovation’ functions. But in a recent article in ComputerWorld, CIOs/CTOs are recognizing that it’s not easy to bifurcate the team partly because there’s a risk of maintaining morale for the group that’s focused on traditional unsexy stuff while another group is exclusively focused on the exciting, innovative stuff.

A recent Forbes article goes even further, calling Gartner’s bimodal IT a “recipe for disaster.” The central challenge with bimodal IT, argues Jason Bloomberg of technology advisory firm, Intellyx, is that it encourages IT management to shift their transformation effort away from the slow, “mode 1” IT (traditional IT services), when the very focus should also be to modernize it. Brownfield ops isn’t going away anytime soon and many end-to-end digital transformation projects are the very integration of brownfield and greenfield on each end. The immortality of mainframes in the enterprise is a well-articulated example of this in the article. Bloomberg further argues that CIOs/CTOs must find ways to transform traditional IT (albeit its challenges) as well as meet the end-to-end digital transformation objectives of the enterprise; brownfield and greenfield ops co-existing with value-creating innovative projects across them end-to-end.