By Skybot
Should All IT Departments be Bimodal?
If your company hasn’t already implemented a bimodal IT strategy, you might be wondering if it’s a necessary strategic change. The advantages are clear: increased speed, flexibility, innovation, and a closer alignment with business units. However, since Gartner introduced the model it has also faced criticism.
One issue is employee morale. There’s a fear that IT staff who end up focusing solely on mode 1 operations will be dissatisfied with their careers, and that it will be difficult to attract top talent to mode 1 jobs. For this reason, many companies avoid a complete separation of the two teams. Small and mid-sized companies are also much less likely than large companies to become entirely bimodal. If your department remains undivided or partially divided, you will still want to free up operations employees to work on mode 2-type projects as much as possible.
Some critics say that the bimodal structure is inefficient. Jason Bloomberg at Intellyx writes that bimodal IT is just an “excuse to keep doing IT poorly,” and that companies should get rid of slow, traditional, IT altogether. Still others argue that IT should be trimodal, with a third division that spans the gap between Gartner’s two modes.
Jason Bloomberg responds:
I don’t believe that companies should get rid of traditional IT. Instead, I believe that traditional IT must transform in order to support the changing needs of the organization, including the fast-moving efforts. IT must continue to focus on security, governance, and maintaining access to systems of record — and must do so in a matter that facilitates and empowers the entire organization.
Read the entire article at http://www.helpsystems.com/skybot/resources/articles/bimodal-it-automation.
