Bimodal IT — safety and accuracy vs. speed and agility

Las Vegas, December 2015 — Get ready for Bimodal IT. That’s the message from the Gartner Application, Architecture, Development & Integration Summit (AADI). It wasn’t a subtle message. Bimodal was a veritable drumbeat, pounded home over and over again in keynotes, classes, and one-on-one meetings with Gartner analysts. We’re going to be hearing a lot about bimodal development, from Gartner and the industry, because it’s a message that really describes what many of us are encountering today.

To quote Gartner’s official definition:

Bimodal IT is the practice of managing two separate, coherent modes of IT delivery, one focused on stability and the other on agility. Mode 1 is traditional and sequential, emphasizing safety and accuracy. Mode 2 is exploratory and nonlinear, emphasizing agility and speed.

Gartner sees that we create and manage two different types of projects. Some, Mode 1, being very serious, very methodical, bet-the-business projects that must be done right using formal processes, and others, Mode 2, being more opportunistic, quicker, more agile. That’s not to say that Mode 1 projects can’t be agile, and that Mode 2 projects can’t be big and significant. However, we all know that there’s a big difference between launching an initiative to implement a Black Friday sale on our website or designing a new store-locator mobile app, vs. rolling out a GAAP-compliant accounting system or migrating critical systems to the cloud.

You might argue that there’s nothing revolutionary here with bimodal, and if you did, you would be right. Nobody ever claimed that all IT projects, including software development, are the same, and should be managed the same way. What Gartner has done is provide a clear vocabulary for understanding, categorizing, and communicating project differences more efficiently.

Read more about this in my story “Mode 1, Mode 2: Gartner Preaches Bimodal Development at AADI,” published on the Parasoft blog.