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Digital Transformation requires Bimodal IT operations. A long time ago, in a business environment less volatile and complex, Agile IT Operations cared only for stability. Then the application economy happened—every company became virtually a software company, and competitive pressures to rapidly innovate and iterate applications increased exponentially.
In response, businesses like yours are pursuing digital transformation strategies—adding digital components to all of their products and services (e.g., mobile applications, universal device support, Internet of Things (IoT), etc.). 
In this environment, Operations have to become agiler—but without sacrificing the stability that has been its hallmark.
Gartner defines this concept as Bimodal IT: Bimodal IT refers to having two modes of IT, each designed to develop and deliver information- and technology-intensive services in its own way.
Mode 1 is traditional, emphasizing scalability, efficiency, safety, and accuracy. Mode 2 is nonsequential, emphasizing agility and speed. While Mode 1 has become table stakes for most operations groups, Mode 2 requires new thinking
and processes around investment management, governance, collaboration and more.
And success in both modes demands smarter, more flexible tools that have been designed to support today’s complex IT operations. Despite the risks and challenges inherent to Bimodal IT, leading organizations understand its importance in helping them meet the ever-growing expectations of today’s customer. And they’re counting on DevOps to help them bridge these two modes.
You’ve probably been hearing about digital transformation, DevOps, and Bimodal IT for some time, but there’s a reason why they’ve recently gone from “nice to have” to necessities: in the application economy, your customers hold all of the power.
Because software is the primary way customers experience your brand today, you must be able to deliver an exceptional experience across all devices—from any place, at any time. Falling down on just one of them can have disastrous consequences.
The consumerization of IT has conditioned users to expect all software to perform flawlessly. But what happens when a company’s new mobile application is slow and clunky compared to its website? A single negative experience broadcast on social media can go viral and cause exponential, far-reaching damage to a brand.
In order to avoid such catastrophes and exceed the expectations of the demanding modern customer, you must overcome a variety of challenges that can prevent Operations groups from reaching their bimodal potential, including:
Operations groups have been monitoring infrastructure and applications since the dawn of IT, but this task has become increasingly complex as IT infrastructures have transformed in recent years.
For many enterprises, decades-old legacy systems and mainframes coexist with virtualized or cloud servers (both on- and off-premises) and as-a-service offerings—creating an intricate maze Operations must navigate when trying to
monitor performance.
When Operations group cannot efficiently trace transactions as they move from customer-facing systems of engagement to back-end systems of record, it can be difficult to pinpoint the root cause of issues. As a result, performance suffers while mean-time-to-resolution extends—both of which can negatively impact the
customer experience.
But what if you could trace transaction movement across cloud, mobile and legacy systems to quickly pinpoint root causes of issues? And what if you could feed that information back into dev/test systems to improve application performance at the code level?
As enterprises grow—whether organically or through acquisition—their IT environments often comprise a mix of legacy and modern components assembled over time. And in many cases, each of these components came with or required its own tool for monitoring performance.
When issues arise in such environments, there are as many “sources of truth” as there are monitoring tools, which can lead to finger pointing and delays as various teams rush to absolve themselves of fault or responsibility.
And in the cases when these disparate tools do produce valuable data, the onus still falls on Operations to collate and triage that information before it can take action and resolve the issue.
At some point in nearly every enterprise’s history, suboptimal design decisions are made in order to satisfy business requirements—creating infrastructure fragility and technical debt. And when fragile systems fail, they create unplanned work for Operations that puts them in a reactive, break/fix mode and takes them away from
supporting business goals.
The business compensates by setting bigger goals, and IT sacrifices manageability and reliability in favor of innovation and speed to meet aggressive deadlines. As a result, more technical debt accumulates, increasing infrastructure fragility and management burden—and restarting the destructive cycle anew.
What’s more, technical debt creates tension between the bimodal aspirations of Operations. On the one side, they’re doing everything they can to reduce or eliminate the technical debt’s impact on IT performance and stability; on the other, they’re potentially creating more debt as they react to market uncertainty and customer demands. Contact Musato Technologies to learn more about our innovative and transformative ICT services and solutions.
An article first published by CA
Gideon Ebonde M. is the CEO and Chief Software Architect at Musato Technologies. He is experienced Software developer with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. He has a strong engineering professional skilled in Mobile Application Development, Enterprise Software, AI, Robotics, IoT, Servers, Cloud and business application. He is an accomplished DevOps software engineer and a visionary computer scientist and engineer.
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