My thoughts this week have drifted towards IT Leadership and the current trend of referring to Bimodal IT (maybe I should get a hobby).
I have always believed that IT serves two distinct purposes. ‘Keep the lights on’ provision of a guaranteed service and innovation to yield competitive advantage. I used to call it Business Continuity and Business Improvement though I think bimodal is much better ‘IT speak’.
In order to keep pace with an increasingly fluid and consumer driven app society organizations need to have a stable backbone infrastructure that acknowledges and facilitates a ‘disposable’ layer of customer interaction.
I am not brave enough to predict which voucher app, payment method or app I’ve not even thought of yet will become dominant, if any, but what I am sure about is that it will not necessarily be the most technically elegant. A rapid adoption curve will be driven by the solution that markets well and catches the consumers imagination.
Imposing rigid process and excessive governance on the world of rapid change will only ever suppress innovation.
All this unknown fluidity goes to support the concept of bimodal leadership. One side of IT focusing on robust core infrastructure, slower paced and more formal delivery methodology delivering guaranteed to work scalable solutions. The other acknowledging that things change, pace of delivery is key to success and that strategic benefit is often gained by being first to market. Of course these two distinct approaches require the usual collaboration and reciprocal understanding.
Bimodal leadership acknowledges the need for two completely different approaches and requires different types of leader, which one are you?