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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

I can’t help it.

Gartner has discovered the need for “Bimodal IT.”

What I can’t help: Pointing out that once again, Gartner has discovered something KJR’s subscribers (back then it was InfoWorld’s “IS Survival Guide”) read about a long time ago … in this case, 1996, when I wrote:

You can’t ignore the Web, and so, probably for the first time, you have to start thinking about serving your company’s RPCs (real paying customers). That will change everything.

Remember when you did feasibility studies, requirements analyses, external designs and internal designs before you got around to coding systems a few years later? Forget it. You’re going to start working in marketing time.

What’s marketing time? That’s how long your company takes to get new products, services, and pricing programs into the public awareness to beat your competition. Years? Forget it. You’re going to be working in months. Sometimes weeks. That means a whole different way of designing and building systems.

Well, better very, very late than never at all, and give Gartner credit for publicizing the concept.

So bimodal IT it is, and publishing precedence be damned.

What you care about is making bimodal IT happen. On that subject there’s a point neither Gartner nor I have explored: The challenge of culture.

Culture is loosely defined as “how we do things around here.” It’s a collection of informal, unwritten rules, enforced with iron discipline through the application of peer pressure.

IT started by automating a lot of the drudgery associated with core accounting. It had a batch-oriented culture which was fine: Accounting is a batch-oriented discipline. It had no tolerance for defects, which also was fine: Accounting balances the books to the penny.

Speed? Speed wasn’t all that important compared to making sure systems provided reports everyone could trust. And by the way, with punch-card-driven batch systems that provided accounting reports, there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for ambiguity when the question was whether a system did what it was supposed to do.

For the most part, the mental habits IT acquired in learning to support accounting are still valid … when it comes to supporting accounting and other “systems of record.” Even if the underlying systems rely on overnight batch processing, they’re supporting a discipline that considers the end of the month and end of the year to have mystical properties.

Okay, that was mean. A more charitable view is that unlike most other departments, Accounting cares enough about the accuracy of its numbers to verify them on a regular basis.

And this emphasis on accuracy reinforces the traditional slow-and-steady culture that pervades so many IT organizations.

Enter bimodal IT. Systems of record don’t go away, and continue to rely on this slow and steady way of viewing the world. But now, coexisting with slow and steady is a need for an entirely different IT culture — one obsessed with speed; one that recognizes when systems have reached the exalted state of good enough and whose members are happy to put good-enough into production.

It’s a culture where late is just as serious a defect as a calculation error, and where poor aesthetics (the marketing buzzword is “ugly”) gets as much attention as overall functionality.

Want to make bimodal IT happen? We can talk methodologies and architectures until we’re blue in the face (speaking of aesthetics) and when we’re done we can’t escape the need for two radically different IT cultures coexisting in the same organization.

The question is whether this is feasible or fantasy.

It’s a good question. For guidance, look at differing cultures in the business as a whole. The view isn’t promising: Accountants talk about the bureaucrats in HR, who sneer at the bean-counters in Accounting in return. Marketing complains about the propeller-heads in IT, who make snide comments about the marketing crazies in return.

And so on. In the business at large, different cultures clash.

How about inside IT? Still not so promising. Among sysadmins members of the Unix and Windows subcultures tend to disrespect each other. Elsewhere, IT operations staff have been known to gripe about developer teams trying to push buggy code into production, while the developers in question gripe about the bureaucracy of the change control board (CCB).

Think that’s bad? Just imagine the resentment of slow-and-steady Accounting developers. While they still have to deal with the CCB, the DevOps teams supporting Marketing practice continuous integration and get to bypass the CCB altogether.

That’s your dilemma. You have to foster two very different IT cultures. And you know before you start that they’ll almost inevitability clash.

* * *

What should you do about it? Great question. But it will have to wait until next week. With any luck I’ll come up with something between now and then.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Just watching a business fail is painful. Being part of the shut-down team is downright brutal, or so I’m told by those who have had to chain the gates at some point in their careers. Shut-downs take as much effort as start-ups, only with no sense of accomplishment on the horizon.

I’ve been a spectator for several of these over the years. Many were mostly preventable.

There are, in the end, only two reasons businesses fail. One is placing the wrong bet. The other is a weak board.

Here’s how wrong bets happen:

A key executive responsibility is figuring out if the current business model has legs or not. It takes crystal-ball gazing at its finest.

The best leaders anticipate future threats and opportunities, and place their bets now so that when the next wave comes they can ride it instead of watching it roll on past.

And, they don’t bet the farm on a single possible future, either. They make a portfolio of bets so that even if only one or two pan out, the company has new revenue streams if a future that invalidates the current business model has the bad taste to arrive.

These exemplary business leaders are, sad to say, an apparent minority. The more usual scenario is that revenue takes a hit for a year or two, leaving the company’s decision-makers where California’s policy makers found themselves a few years back: Figuring out whether the drought was a blip or a fundamental change in the [business] climate.

It’s a tough call and a hard bet to make. For blips, the best answer is probably to ride it out, doing some diversification for bet-hedging but using most of the company’s reserves to keep things intact until the temporary downturn upturns.

If, on the other hand, it’s climate change in action, failing to use the company’s reserves to invest in new business models designed to address the fundamentally changed marketplace is disastrous: By the time the change stops being a guess and becomes an inescapable reality, it’s usually too late.

Making a portfolio of bets sure looks like the clear winning alternative, doesn’t it? Interesting that it’s the polar opposite of the popular-with-Wall-Street strategy of “concentrating on the core,” as McDonald’s did when it sold the fast-growing Chipotle to concentrate on its tired, aging fast-food brand.

For the most part I sympathize with businesses … especially smaller businesses … that find themselves on the horns of the changing-marketplace dilemma. Often, their business is what it is, with no obvious opportunities for diversification that can leverage the business existing capabilities.

Sympathize, but not to the point of accepting helplessness as a reason for their eventual failure. Because they aren’t helpless, unless you count a weak board as helpless.

With few exceptions, mostly in the non-profit arena, boards pay their CEOs well. Boards generally pay themselves well, too, and for not all that much work, either. In the end boards have just one responsibility: Making sure the CEO is the right person for the job, and if not, replacing him or her with a new CEO who is the right person for the job.

All the other things boards do, like reviewing large proposed capital expenditures, they do because they don’t trust the company’s executive team to make prudent decisions. Why? Re-read the previous paragraph.

Here’s one that’s a perfect example: For the better part of a decade this failing company’s CEO treated his position as an opportunity for personal enrichment and self-aggrandizement. The board was composed of his cronies, who were delighted to participate in the sham in exchange for getting paid to do, for all practical purposes, nothing at all.

The company’s products sold through exchanges, so it had no control over pricing. Its best bet was to produce its products with relentless discipline and efficiency. But given that the CEO couldn’t even be bothered to visit its factories, and was publicly profligate in spending the company’s money besides, relentless discipline and efficiency just weren’t going to happen.

By the time the board finally did terminate him, easily five years after the need to do so was abundantly clear to any impartial observer, the situation was close to irretrievable even before the price for the product it sells took a major hit.

The economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase “creative destruction” to describe results like this and called it “the essential fact about capitalism.”

If so, then by inference bad management, aided and abetted by weak boards, must be an equally essential fact about capitalism.

But this isn’t a fact. It’s a choice.

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