Gartner refers to bimodal IT as “having two modes of IT, each designed to develop and deliver information- and technology-intensive services in its own way.”
If this week’s top articles are any indication, it’s certainly a topic that is at forefront everyone’s minds. We’ve especially been enjoying Kurt Marko’s series for Forbes. For some, bimodal is just another buzzword, but for others, it presents an entirely new way of approaching IT. It disrupts legacy IT, offering groundbreaking tactics for testing and rolling-out new technologies. No other area of IT needs this more than the network. As we’ve frequently discussed, storage and compute have evolved rapidly over the last decade, but networking has remained unchanged – despite huge shifts in the way we manage and move information. The articles below are certainly a good start to a lengthy discussion. Enjoy!
Forbes: Bimodal IT Doesn’t Mean Bipolar Organizations: The Path to IT Transformation
By Kurt Marko
Never underestimate a buzzword’s power to frame the discussion. As I recently discussed, the term bimodal IT has captured the imagination and polemical energy of technology commentators and like many IT discussions in the age of 140-character commentary, it often degenerates into polarized, all-or-nothing positions. Using a variant of the classic reductio ad absurdum strategy, critiques of bimodal IT characterize it as a path to bipolarIT, a separate, but unequal partitioning. In the dynamic mode 2 corner we have hip, swashbuckling cloud gurus mashing together exciting new applications out of myriad cloud services, while in the dingy mode 1 corner we have the conservative old guard serving out their golden years by tending to legacy systems that (ideally) hum along until both they and their caretakers, like all good soldiers, just fade away. While it makes good rhetoric, this isn’t the way successful IT organizations navigate foundational change agents like the cloud.
Campus Technology: The Risks and Rewards of Bimodal IT
By David Raths
IT organizations are increasingly combining a conventional approach to core systems with a more agile, exploratory approach to projects with greater uncertainty — a pattern that research firm Gartner has described as “bimodal IT.” “Bimodal is a marriage of two distinctly different but coherent approaches to delivering business change,” said Simon Mingay, a Gartner research vice president, during a recent webinar presentation. “Mode 1 is the traditional rock-solid approach that we all know and love and Mode 2 is more iterative and nonlinear and tends to be applied to projects of significant value”
SD Times: Guest View: Bimodal IT supports new requirements for agile app development
By Sean Allen
For years IT organizations have been criticized for being too slow, too restrictive and unresponsive to the business. Analysts and vendors have pushed IT to transform itself as a whole, and encouraged the adoption of technologies that enable agility. But a new perspective on IT is gaining steam. Instead of changing the face of IT, industry experts are asserting that IT organizations should operate as two separate functions, or modes, if you will – what Gartner refers to as Bimodal IT. Given the drive toward innovation and the nature of today’s apps, this approach makes perfect sense.
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