Bimodal IT Interview: I’m baaaaack baby!

Today I was nearly run over by Sir Bimodal IT, the slow-and-fast knight of Enterprise IT duality. Here’s what he had to say to me.

JE: Sir Bimodal IT, everyone thought they heard the last of you the last time I wrote about you, about three years ago. We figured, after all the articles and criticism you might be finished, but you are still hanging around here. What do you have to say to your critics?

BIT: I’m baaaaack like Game of Thrones! The rumors of my demise were even more greatly overestimated than you think. You may have heard so-called “IT experts” like Jason Bloomberg say back then that I was not only flawed, but dangerous to the enterprise.

But Sir Bimodal IT doesn’t need to respond to such criticism. I still maintain that I am a reality for many companies, even if they don’t like me or even believe in me. You can still find my old definition if you Google me:

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. (Bimodal IT definition, Gartner, 2017)

JE: Yeah, but I’ve heard that from you. What have you been doing since then? It seemed like Martin Fowler, Simon Wardley, IDC & ZDnet, a bunch of other well-known writers debunked you rather publicly around 2016, and even Gartner backed away from the “only sustainable solution” part of that definition, so now you are merely a practice or model.

BIT: Well, I’ve been biding my time. Hearing complaints from workers toiling away in server rooms and cube farms. I never really went away though.

Lately I’ve been considering hitching my wagon to the term ‘digital transformation’ and perhaps being the referee between the two sides of an enterprise IT shop, the haves, and the have-nots.

JE: That’s a gross mischaracterization of digital transformation. You mean, you will judge between the people who have digitally transformed, and those who have not?

BIT: Exactly! Even within a company – department to department. Morale will be great among employees working in Mode 2, with all the containers and AI ops and foosball tables and release cycles based on customer demand and killer analytics. Kids on the fast track with the cool technology will love me again.

But for slow-mode-1 employees, it’s back to the grind. Debugging data imports, looking at server logs, rebooting and copying everything in case of failure. Someone’s gotta keep the lights blinking after all, and it’s a job. Someday, you’ll renovate things.

JE: I think you are missing the point that big strides are underway to renovate much of what you were calling your ‘mode 1’ or slow-changing systems: mainframes, big enterprise apps, data repositories, embedded systems, existing networks — now they act more like ‘mode 2’ systems thanks to ease of integration, testing and virtualization.

In fact, mainframes are agile centers of transformation now. The mainframe was the first client of virtualization and container-like behaviors. It is even more like a first class integration citizen now, working with more portable and open solutions, merged in with continuous delivery…

Most systems are becoming easier to automate and deploy in today’s multi-cloud, modular, hybrid IT infrastructures. You have an entirely new class of AI Ops vendors replacing IT fire drills with intelligent remediation and fast MTTR. So all you are doing is sowing discontent.

BIT: Hogwash! Where’s the job security for workers if all that manual labor gets automated, if errors are repeatable and root cause becomes self-evident? Who wants to live a scary, disruptive life, where you are never as good as the next new thing? Not the mode 1 people!

For Mode 2 people though, you want to attract the best, they need to feel better than the Mode 1 people when they show up in your cool workspace. IT managers, be sure to show them by the uncool side of the office and falsely offer to help out the people over there in the trenches.

JE: Putting that aside as disastrous idea for any company’s morale, how did you come back anyway, after all these years?

BIT: It’s simple — I replicated myself using some big vendors who profit by taking my advice about keeping IT bifurcated. Unchanging, fragile and slow-changing systems can be perpetually licensed to the enterprise and expensively supported by my army of consultants.

And, now I can also offer Cool Mode 2 services to companies who want to think they are moving fast and breaking things, without the less glamorous work of bringing along the rest of the house. New widget vendors and boutique project studios can also profit handsomely selling throwaway pilot projects, adapters, demos and maybe a cool dashboard on top of the old stuff. It won’t fix the enterprise bimodal IT problem, but it will make customers feel like they are trying something.

This vicious cycle not only puts food on the table of technology recruiters trying to fill abandoned posts, it spreads renewed interest in me — at the speed of light. People will forget they forgot about Sir Bimodal IT.

They may even go back to calling me by my original name — ‘Sir TheWay ThingsAre.’ Ah, I do miss those days!

But to all my fans, I haven’t forgotten about you. You know who you are, and that there is good money to be made in solving the problems I can create!

JE: All in all, a rather cynical view, Sir. I don’t see a reason to throw anyone under your hooves right now. There’s too many positive indicators for more widespread, shared agility in companies today.

BIT: Well have it your way. Or have it mine. Either way, you have already selected one mode over the other. Sir Bimodal IT out!!

©2019 Intellyx LLC. Sharing or reprint of this work, edited for length with attribution is authorized, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. At the time of this writing, none of the companies mentioned above are Intellyx customers. Image credits: bluefug (Jason English) from open images.