According to Gartner, “Bimodal-IT is getting a lot of focus as CIOs and IT leaders strive to build IT organizations capable of responding to threats and opportunities of digital economy, while maintaining and enhancing traditional infrastructure and services”, and you have to agree. Enterprises are in a digital transformation tug of war. There is business and competitive pressure, driving it to deliver more and deliver faster. Then there is IT on the hook to maintain enterprise-class SLAs with the current app and infrastructure load.

Under the bimodal approach, IT is essentially divided into two modes: legacy processes, often related to upkeep are Mode 1, while Mode 2 are more forward-thinking and future-focused, emphasizing agility and speed and embracing agility, speed and embracing new options.

The reason we need this approach, as explained in the introduction, is business and competitive pressure. Competitive pressure means that businesses need to leverage mobile apps to enable new capabilities for engaging customers, redefining business processes, driving up productivity, cutting costs, and generating new revenue sources. If you do not embrace mobile, you risk being disrupted and left behind by competitors and new market entrants.

The road block

According to surveys of Gartner’s end-user client base, 75% of enterprises are experiencing this bifurcation of IT, and half of them are going to fail. The main reasons for failure is that they are trying to apply traditional IT mentality to next-generation application services and are failing to adopt new technologies, relying on traditional vendors to solve next-generation challenges. An answer to this problem can be inviting new/emerging vendors in to obtain new ideas. If the Mode 2 IT is to be successfully adopted, you have to think differently, challenge the storage status quo and look at technologies specifically designed to meet the needs of the next generation data center.

Adaptive sourcing

Once vendors have a handle on the potential challenges, they can begin leveraging adaptive sourcing to improve business operations and help bimodal IT perform up to expectations. In a June 2015 summit, Gartner suggested this type of sourcing will help deliver the requirements of the two modes in a more controlled and coherent fashion. There is a three-layer model through which this can be facilitated.

• Innovate – Services are sourced on an ad-hoc basis and entail a short lifecycle.
• Differentiate – Services enable ongoing improvement of company processes and need frequent reconfiguring to keep up with changing practices and requirements.
• Run – Services support end-to-end delivery of IT services and are often subject to the highest control needs like security and compliance.

A good outsourcing partner can better guide their bimodal IT clients with the best tools by understanding these layers.

According to Gartner research Vice President Ruby Jivan, “Adaptive sourcing affects operating practices at many levels, so CIOs who anticipate the effects are more likely to succeed.”

But also, the success of adaptive sourcing depends on the agility of the sourcing and vendor management organization to embrace robust management practices.

Dividing the IT team into two equal parts will help eliminate the inefficiencies by allowing members to focus on innovation work or daily maintenance jobs. Outsourcing partners must ensure that neither side is alienated and that the provided tools are going to help both sides to be successful.