Traditional IT is focused on “doing IT right”, with a strong emphasis on efficiency and safety, approval-based governance and price-for-performance. Agile IT is focused on “doing IT fast”, supporting prototyping and iterative development, rapid delivery, continuous and process-based governance, and value to the business (being business-centric and close to the customer).
http://blogs.gartner.com/lydia_leong/2014/08/25/bimodal-it-vmworld-and-the-future-of-vmware/
Really? Do we really want to believe that we have to choose between doing things right vs doing things fast? And btw, Agile is not about being fast as a goal itself. It’s all about agility. Being able to test, pivot, and adapt to new insights. Leading to doing the right things, while the continuous improvement should lead to increasingly doing things right.
I hate how this approach implies that being Agile makes products and teams less efficient & safe. I hope this kind of ideas doesn’t lead to more half assed agile implementations that stop at a suboptimal level by not being able to effect a company wide change over time. In my experience and from what I see & read around me, the tradeoff mentioned in the Bimodal IT descriptions simply does not exist; Agile teams focus on safety, efficiency and performance just as much, if that is what turns out to be valuable to a company and their people.
But maybe I’m blinded by my beliefs. And happy to be proven wrong. 🙂
What do you think?
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