How IT departments are keeping the lights on while creating innovative development teams.
For such a seemingly obvious idea, Gartner ignited quite a firestorm with its proposition that, to remain relevant, IT must be broken into two distinct realms: one focused on keeping the lights on, or, in Gartner parlance, Mode 1, and one devoted to the cool stuff that business people want, or Mode 2.
Gartner introduced the concept of bimodal IT in 2013. “Originally, it was meant as a way to deal with agile development,” explained Daryl Plummer, managing vice president and Gartner Fellow. At the time, Plummer made this prediction: “Forty-five percent of CIOs state they currently have a fast mode of operation, and we believe that by 2017 75 percent of IT organizations will have gone bimodal in some way.”
As Plummer pointed out, forward thinking IT departments have been running like this for a long time; with one part of the IT organization focused on making sure the business runs reliably, and the other part focused on the new shiny objects the business really wants and needs.
“We’ve been doing this for decades,” says industry analyst Sandy Kemsley, who focuses on business process management. “It’s nothing new.”
But two things have changed. First, there are more tools and methods that developers can use; DevOps, high level programming languages like Perl and Python, PaaS platforms like Salesforce.com’s Force.com.
And there is a heightened business imperative to move new, often digital, products and services to market faster and to streamline operations and processes to support digital transformation.
Not hiding any more
In the past, companies would try to hide these efforts by squirreling away Visual Basic macros in unmanaged spreadsheets known to only a handful of developers. So when “Joe” left the company, the knowledge about where the code was held and how it worked often left with him. “Every financial services customer I’ve ever seen, they all, somewhere in their back office, have that dirty little secret,” Kemsley says.
Today, the new breed of business process management (BPM) suites are beginning to be sold as Mode 2 development platforms. This enables what Kemsely calls “citizen developers” to rework how the business runs using drag-and-drop functionality that eventually has to be supported by the Mode 1 operations people.
“It’s like the camel’s nose in the tent,” she said, referring to the fact that the rest of the animal is eventually going to find its way in.
Kemsley is aware of companies that are re-working their customer-facing business processes using these suites – all without the knowledge, buy-in, or help of IT. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is the reality of what’s happening on the ground, she says. Mode 1 IT needs to figure out how to work with these newly emerging shadow IT groups.
So if it’s a given that bimodal IT is happening, how does Mode 1 IT manage it in the way that IT needs it managed. That means strong governance and compliance oversight, transactional and architectural integrity, maintainability, and all the rest of the stuff that keeps a business running. And at the same time, IT needs to ensure the outcomes the business needs: the ability to respond to fast-changing market conditions with new products rolled-out on accelerated timelines.
When IT executive Maria Urani was faced with this conundrum, she answered in typical Mode 2 fashion: by pulling together a small, multi-talented team and walling them off from the cultural influences and procedural roadblocks of the organization’s IT department.
Her challenge? Develop a new digital direct-to-consumer product line for a Fortune 100 company that still did most of its business through handshakes and referrals.
The outcome? “We did it $9 million cheaper because we took this approach,” says Urani, who is now the CIO of Net Jets, in Columbus, Ohio. “We would build and release as much as we could but, when we had to connect to systems of record, we could only do that as dictated by the big guy [Mode 1 IT] with monthly releases.”
The team would work in whatever ways moved the project forward. Developers built functionality based on their graphic designer’s webpage mock ups, for example. When one part of the project was being reviewed by IT, they would continue working on other aspects of the offering. They didn’t do traditional status reporting or hold formal meetings. Instead, project sponsors had to settle for walk-by show and tells.
“It can be done,” she says. “But you have to have the right tech lead, you have to have a product owner who is passionate about it, and the ability to use poly-skilled people.”
The initial team was composed of two developers, a business/product owner, and a tester. As the project progressed, any gaps within initial team’s composition were filled in. Not including a project manager, for example, was identified as an early mistake that was quickly rectified.
This skunkworks-style approach wasn’t about shutting IT out. Indeed, they proceeded with IT’s blessing. The whole point was to get a low-margin, niche product to market as fast and cheaply as possible in order to keep up with competitors who had already moved online. So the business imperative was obvious even though the return on investment (ROI) numbers were thin.
Before starting out, she developed an execution plan that adhered to these guideposts. The project had to:
- Be efficient and cost effective
- Ensure speed to market
- Conform to key enterprise standards
- Pose an acceptable risk to business and IT
- Realize success or failure early
- Be realistic and doable
Adopting a startup mentality
In many ways, Urani’s approach resembled that of a startup: small teams, quick wins, and a mindset that stripped away all the nice-to-haves, favoring just features to make the product functional and attractive to buyers. If the offering is successful, you can always add features and functions later. If it’s not, you’ve saved time, energy, and resources by failing fast and small.
This thinking extended to the rollout as well. Being a very large company, executives were used to doing big things in big ways. But, given the project’s dubious ROI, Urani’s team pushed back.
“If they had done it the way they wanted to they would have gotten one state rolled out in nine months,” she said. Instead, Urani’s team found the easiest states to work in from a regulatory point of view and started there. This resulted in a 15-state rollout by the end of the product’s first year. An additional 25 states were added the following year.
In her post-op report, Urani lists the following as keys to her success:
- A small team with high-performing, poly-skilled team members
- Focusing on new, user-facing applications or products
- Business buy-in and participation
- The ability to collocate (i.e., have their own work space)
- A dedicated hardware/development infrastructure
The view from the data center
John White, vice president of product strategy at regional data center provider Expedient, has to support bimodal for two distinct groups: his internal teams and his mid-market clients.
“[The SMBs] are the ones that are kind of sitting in the middle and trying to figure out, ‘OK, I see all the people moving really fast and I see all the great things that they’re doing. How am I ever going to take my Mode 1 shop and move to Mode 2?'”
Internally, Expedient must answer the same questions. It wrote all of its ticketing and support management applications in-house and now White’s internal development teams also want what their customers want: faster development cycle times and rollouts. To meet this demand, they are moving to a container-based architecture and are opting for faster release cycles.
“But now we need to figure out, ‘How do we integrate with containers? How do we start to isolate things and build things in microservices? We’re just trying to keep it very modular and that allow us to grow quickly as we continue to scale this business,” he said.
To speed up the development and release cycles, they have deployed “Tiger Teams” – groups of experts that come together to focus on a single issue, problem, or project, like the development of APIs so Expedient can scale their offering by integrating with all the public cloud providers.
Moving up the stack
To manage the ever-increasing demand for managed services from their customers, Expedient is deploying hybrid data center solutions that integrate public and private cloud along with customer’s colo racks.
“I think that that’s where the shift from Mode 1 to 2 is starting to occur,” he says. “Where they’re saying, ‘Yes, we need this but let’s reduce our actual time that we need to spend on Mode 1. Let’s figure out how we can start to roll things out in containers so we get more consistency, better automation, faster scaling.”
To facilitate this need, Expedient has upped its hybrid cloud game, using VMware’s NSX network virtualization platform to connect geographically distributed pools of resources and create a “big, fat Layer 2 network” between the public cloud players like AWS and Azure, as well as corporate-owned data centers and data center providers with whom Expedient has peering agreements.
“If you don’t have those things, you’re not going to be able to really handle and bridge that Mode 1 to Mode 2,” he says.
Countering the culture clash
Finally, there is a cultural aspect that must be addressed, said Kemsley. Never having known unconnected day in their lives, today’s crop of developers are digital natives. They want to work on the latest greatest stuff. They want to work with the latest tools and use shiny new things to bridge the digital divide that currently separates many companies from their customers.
That is also why IT needs to embrace the reality of bimodal and provide these shadow-IT warriors with a platform that will enable them to maintain control while giving the Mode 2 and citizen developer creative freedom.
Kemsley’s bimodal best practices check list includes:
- Recognition by IT this is going happening today
- Open lines of communication
- Providing developers in both the Mode 2 and citizen developer camps with a standardized development platform so apps can be integrated-into and supported-by Mode 1 IT and so good apps can be easily shared across the organization.
“These newer age developers that are coming up, they’re instant gratification people,” agreed White. “They’re not going to wait six months to see their code. They want it released in two weeks. They want to use continuous integration, continuous deployment. That’s the kind of methodology they want to use now.”
Bernard is a veteran freelance business and technology writer, former managing editor and entrepreneur. He can be reached at abernie182@gmail.com or on Twitter at @allen_bernard1.
