1. Bi-modal IT is real, and it’s likely to be embraced by your company
Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner and global head of research, said last November that while CIOs might not be able to transform their existing IT department into a digital startup, they could turn it into a bi-modal IT organization. “Forty-five percent of CIOs state they currently have a fast mode of operation,” said Sondergaard, “and we predict that 75 percent of IT organizations will be bi-modal in some way by 2017.”
Jerry Luftman, Ph.D., professor and managing director at the Global Institute for IT Management, also confirms that there’s a bifurcating of the IT department. “It’s clearly happening,” Luftman says.
2. Larger companies are more likely to try a bi-modal setup
Arjun Sethi, a partner with the global consulting firm A.T. Kearney, where he leads the strategic IT Practice for the Americas, confirms that he’s seeing an increase in the number of IT organizations that have this duality, although he qualifies it by pointing out he sees it mostly in large, progressive companies. “I’m not talking about small and medium-size organizations,” he says.
Rob Meilen, vice president and CIO at Hunter Douglas North America in Broomfield, Colo., oversees an IT team of 120, supplemented by another 30 to 40 workers in outsourced or contract positions. “We don’t have a formal separation, but in the past two years we’ve been talking more about the different focus of those two areas,” he says, noting that the company is beginning to review how it budgets and allocates resources to reflect those two IT functions.
[Related: What Gartner’s bimodal IT model means to enterprise CIOs]
He says creating any more of a separation between the two sides wouldn’t work well in an organization his size because it could either leave some areas without needed talent or force the company to hire more talent. “Sometimes we’re only two people deep in a particular skill set, so it gets pretty thin if you’re going to divide it up into two sets of teams,” he says.
3. How IT is funded plays a role in the decision to go bi-modal
Robert Quarterman, vice president of Infrastructure Architecture and Technical Services at Service Benefit Plan Administrative Services Corp., says operations “is really about running the business, so once innovation is done, it becomes operationalized,” adding that that side of the house “operates at a different speed. They have different priorities, and different funding.” Funding for operations comes from the central IT department, he explains, whereas funding for innovation comes from business units – as does advocacy for individual projects.
Jerry Luftman, Ph.D., professor and managing director at the Global Institute for IT Management, says the split is driven in part by the decentralization of IT, with more and more of the strategic applications owned by the business units and “less and less going into central IT.”
4. Bi-modal IT isn’t exactly new
Greg Davidson, a consultant with AlixPartners, says IT departments have always had some aspects of a bimodal approach. “There has always been the IT staff that works on the keep-it-running side of the business. When you’re looking at things like desktop support, data center monitoring, application maintenance – those kinds of things have been around for a long time,” he says.
Like other CIOs, Meilen says it’s the work itself that often falls into one of two camps, with one focused on new technology-enabled business initiatives and the second focused on keeping everything up and running smoothly. IT workers, too, seem to fall into these two buckets, Meilen says, although like the work itself, there’s usually some overlap.
5. Bi-modal IT can coexist with outsourcing
Given the commoditized nature of the operational work, many CIOs are turning to third-parties to handle a large chunk of the operational tasks, Sethi says – typically the very standard parts, such as low-level programming. They keep high-value skills in-house, skills such as high-level architecture because internal workers have the skills and organizational knowledge needed to help define the CIO’s overall infrastructure strategy.
[Related: 10 outsourcing trends to watch in 2015]
CIOs can make this move to more outsourcing, he says, in large part because they’ve spent a lot of energy in moving IT toward “a more standardized and more predictable stack, all the way from the hardware to their application layer. And the moment it becomes more standardized and predictable and the level of customization is low, they lend themselves very well to a hosted or managed service environment, and then it becomes easier for a third party to run them.”
6. Bi-modal IT doesn’t have to mean two separate teams
Dale Denham, CIO of Geiger in Lewiston, Maine, has a 25-member IT department that supports 750 workers (300 staffers and 450 independent contractors). Denham recognizes the inherent value of a bi-modal IT philosophy. “It’s absolutely true in a lot of places, and there’s no doubt that both functions exist,” says Denham, adding “I handle it differently than most places” – by mixing operations and innovation within a single team.
While Denham acknowledges that a handful of help desk folks and networking staff are straight operations, he still feels they support innovation by, for example, spinning up a server when needed.
But overall, he explains, “when we launch new projects and new tools, the same people who support old tools are creating the plans and executing the plans for the new tools and then support them when they move to operations.”