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In one of the more satisfying bits of recent sociological research, Michael Kasumovic and Jeffrey Kuznekoff discovered a correlation between poor performance and abusive behavior toward women in on-line gaming.

It’s tempting to extrapolate to the workplace. It’s even more tempting to use “Speaking of losers,” as my transition to continuing last week’s look at Gartner’s bimodal IT model.

It’s tempting, but unfair. Just because Gartner showed up 15 years after the party began doesn’t mean it’s missed the boat. After all, for many in our industry there is no boat until Gartner floats one.

Anyway …

To its credit Gartner has (finally) recognized the need for what it calls “bimodal IT.” But it hasn’t explored a challenging, near-inevitable consequence of establishing two radically different working styles — dueling cultures. The fast one will inevitably look like the CIO’s favorite son while those relegated to supporting the company’s systems of record will feel like red-headed stepchildren.

I’m not the only one concerned about the consequences of bimodal IT. In a Comment, long-time correspondent Stephen Bounds pointed to a piece by Simon Wardley (very perceptive writer; recommended) that’s highly critical of the whole bimodal approach.

Wardley’s concern is that two modes aren’t enough. He proposes three: Pioneers (Gartner’s high-speed branch), Town Planners (Gartner’s slow-speed branch), and an intermediate mode he calls “Settlers” that industrializes the work of the Pioneers.

If IT is limited to Pioneers and Town Planners, Wardley argues, you’ll end up accumulating a bunch of functional but poorly constructed junk that, over a span of perhaps five years, will turn into “spaghetti junction.”

The Settler role is reminiscent of a process proposed in this space back in 2002 — the Access Tangle Replacement Methodology (ATRM). ATRM applies an architectural perspective to the collection of point solutions shadow IT and other Pioneering groups put together, using them to define the aggregate requirements for a more broadly-based architecturally sound environment.

But in modern businesses, Settlers aren’t needed to clean up the messily constructed systems created by IT’s fast-mode Pioneers, because IT’s Pioneers don’t build poorly constructed systems. Modern IT’s fast mode uses some form of DevOps and delivers well-constructed software that doesn’t need cleaning up.

Settlers are still needed, but to bring systems built by shadow-IT projects into conformance with IT standards. It’s a vital role, but a different one.

Left to their own devices, Settler-supported shadow IT and fast-mode Agile/DevOps teams create a very different type of mess — an unplanned landscape. Metaphorically, it would be as if a large number of individual real-estate developers built wherever they pleased, with no zoning laws or urban planning to constrain them.

It would, that is, be like medieval London.Map of Medieval London

The so-called best-practice solution to this challenge (so-called because it’s way too early in the game to enshrine one solution as best) is called “scaled Agile.” Without endorsing or critiquing any specific approach to scaling Agile, my colleagues and I are discovering that many of the organizations attempting to scale Agile find themselves less agile than they were with waterfall.

Trimodal IT offers an alternative.

My old ATRM fixed medieval-London-ish systems through an approach we might call “scaled refactoring.”

Scaled refactoring leaves Agile/DevOps teams to do what they do best, which is to quickly develop small solutions to well-defined business problems. It leaves shadow IT’s pioneers to build rough-and-ready prototypes, which an IT Settler function converts to well-plumbed and wired production-ready applications.

In the aggregate these provide the requirements and specifications for industrial-strength enterprise-scale systems that metaphorically turn medieval London into a modern metropolis.

There’s just one problem with this model: It’s horrible — horrible because it recreates the same giant technology replacement programs that so often suck all the oxygen out of a business. I’ve abandoned ATRM as a bad idea because it relies on the successful execution of a very large, waterfall-style project that looks a lot like a traditional systems conversion.

Ugh.

Wardley provides the sketch of a solution that fits a different, important concept that’s emerging in our industry: Agile enterprise technical architecture management (ETAM).

Wardley describes his approach as progressive theft: Settlers “steal” applications from Pioneers to industrialize them; Town Planners steal them from settlers to incorporate them into the enterprise technical architecture.

Town Planning’s (aka ETAM’s) success, that is, comes from ongoing incremental misdemeanors. This is good. Massive remediation efforts are by definition Big Projects, which means they usually turn into felonious failures.

* * *

We still haven’t addressed the cultural challenge of fast-mode/slow-mode conflict. Instead, we made it worse by adding a third culture to the mix. We’ll get there next week. Unless, of course, something else distracts me.

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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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