Digital Transformation IT Strategy & Business Alignment Leadership

Bimodal IT: Challenges and Lessons Learnt

Bi Modal IT has gone mainstream. So how are CIOs evaluating the impact of Bi modal IT adoption in their organizations? What has been the success rate? What were some of the challenges that CIOs faced while implementing it and what are some of the lessons learned. Has Bi Modal IT delivered on its promise?

Contributor

    • Sahal Lahar, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Brooks Brothers

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Transcript 

Sanjog Aul [00:00:00]:
Hello and welcome to this segment on CTN. To learn more please visit CIO talknetwork.com and today’s topic is Bimodal IT Challenges And Lessons Learnt and we have Sahal Lahar, who’s the Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer with Brooks Brothers. Hi Sahal, good morning.

Sahal Lahar [00:00:17]:
Good morning, Sanjog. How are you?

Sanjog Aul [00:00:19]:
Very good, sir. How’s life ?

Sahal Lahar [00:00:22]:
Doing great, we are off to a busy start already in 2016.

Sanjog Aul [00:00:27]:
That’s great and as we are getting started, we wanted to touch this topic on bimodal IT. So the concept was introduced as two speed IT and then we spoke about that as a bimodal IT and it’s been adopted by a number of companies. There has been an interesting journey. Some people have had challenges in the way they tried to get value out of it and then others who are still on the fence trying to see whether this is for them. So our goal today is to actually look at what has been the journey, what have been the challenges, what are successes, best practices and gotchas and pitfalls that you have to watch out for. So that said, if we are looking at this evolution of bimodal IT, of course there is a business case around it, but then there are people who say that not sure if it is for us, what is a qualification, if you will, a criteria of qualifying whether bimodal IT is for an organization or that’s something just people who are naysayers are the one who are making excuses.

Sahal Lahar [00:01:32]:
Though in my opinion, I think bimodal is really the path forward and everyone needs to adopt it because that is going to be the only way that you can survive in the digitally driven world that we live in where consumer demand and customer demand is at an all time high, with customers more empowered than ever and really demanding more and more from businesses. So I think if you are in any kind of business that has a component where you sell private or market to customers, then bimodal IT really is essential for you to speed up transformation in your organization and allow these new capabilities to be delivered rapidly.

Sanjog Aul [00:02:23]:
So would you say that the reason we actually had to introduce that we cannot really do away with our legacy infrastructure or applications and we needed that predictability of what’s working there but that predictability comes at a cost of being slow and in order for you to move ahead at a speed where innovation is in the forefront, that’s where you needed to create another capability and now that you’ve got two different speeds at which you’re trying to run and that’s why the bimodal IT concept was born, as that what we are saying, fundamentally?

Sahal Lahar [00:02:58]:
Fundamentally, yes, that’s exactly what we’re saying. I think the traditional, what’s known as mode 1 in the bimodal world, which is very linear, keeps the lights on, very predictable, focus is on the old way of development, waterfall development, et cetera, that people have just realized that she is not able to keep up with the demands of the business anymore and in the even before bimodal IT started, there was a shadow IT, or without IT, where people would do these initiatives in the margin, behind the scenes and they would do it without alignment with all of the business owners, without alignment with IT and really, I think bimodal IT gives you the ability to get rid of the shadow IT or the stealth IT, which is very risky because you don’t have the right alignment and the right consensus and you also don’t have any kind of governance around that, so things that you can really get out of control and initiatives end up not being successful in that model, so this is really what has led to what is known as mode 2, right within bimodal IT, which is the agile and really innovative approach to responding to the organization with where IT is not seen as a bottleneck for the people that are saying no or the people that are saying sure, we can give you that, but we’ll see you in 18 months. It really requires everyone to adopt a new mindset.

Sanjog Aul [00:04:39]:
Would you think about this as a stopgap, because if you have legacy infrastructure applications you’re dealing with and maybe you have a modernization play in the works, if all that is done, do you think we can come back to one mode versus carring the two, or this is a process, or this has to exist forever because you’ll always have things that you have to make work in a predictable fashion but then you also want sandboxing happening for innovation.

Sahal Lahar [00:05:09]:
So I think that it will exist for the foreseeable future because I think you’re always going to have centers that are more in steady state and you really need the mode 1 type of oversight and maintenance flows where not a lot’s changing. You’re keeping the trains running, keeping the lights on, but you’re going to need to continue to innovate with other facilities. You’re going to need to continue to innovate with new capabilities in other areas. So I think that in my opinion it would be unrealistic to for this to be, a short term craze that goes away and we merge back into one mode because I think that requires very different disciplines, it requires very different cultural mindset and that I think are some of the key lessons learned and we’ll talk more about that as we get later in the show but that I think has really been a wake up call to IT organizations to show that there are different ways of working and we need the people that want a mode 1 type role where it’s predictable and we also need the people in the mode 2 roles

Sahal Lahar [00:06:23]:
and those are two different types of individuals. We have to respect that and not fall into the trap of expecting that one IT team can wear both hats effectively.

Sanjog Aul [00:06:36]:
Now, if you were to wear the hat of say a pseudo analyst and paint the picture of the state of bimodal IT today, do you think it is fully cooked in terms of what it offered, the way we had built the practices around it and the way the results have been seen by organizations investing in it?

Sahal Lahar [00:06:58]:
I think there’s still work to be done. I think we have basic constructs around bimodal IT, but honestly is though very new. I think people are still continuing to recline the finer working plan around the model, around the governance, around cost attributes, value attributes and so there’s all I think work to be done to get it fully mature and at the same time I think there’s also an element of you live and you learn and so the first organizations that have adopted bimodal IT are sharing some of these lessons learned and recalibrating the model, to say when we first started out on our journey, we felt that you couldn’t follow these definitions and what we really found is that we got 2/3 down the list and really had to change our approach,

Sahal Lahar [00:07:49]:
so I would say we are still we installed not quite there in terms of being fully mature but as more and more organizations are adopting it, I think that is going to come sooner rather than later.

Sanjog Aul [00:08:04]:
Let’s take a quick break listeners, and when we come back, let’s look at the various phases of this whole phenomena or this new paradigm shift that we are looking to adopt. So you start with conceptualization and then you try to come up with a business case. Subsequently you do some planning, then you do execution and then you do governance. So if you look at these different phases where bimodal IT has to be picked up and you have to run with it, where are the challenges? What have we seen truly where there are hiccups and or gaps in knowledge and experience which is holding us back. Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:09:43]:
Welcome back. Sahal did mention in your last response that there are some issues. It is still evolving. So if you were to split it a little bit or maybe dig a little deeper. So in the conceptualization phase or business case development and funding phase, in planning and execution and governance phases, any change or any paradigm shift have to go through this and then perhaps you could have other technology related evolution that needs to happen, the tools, technology, processes. So if you were to go into each of those and give your take, give your perspective on where do you think the challenges are or the gaps or things that we have to improve upon?

Sahal Lahar [00:10:20]:
Absolutely, so I would say that really to me, it starts with identifying the initiative and determining which initiative flows through mode one and which initiative flow through mode two. People have a misconception that any new capability should flow through mode two, which is not correct. Really the way to look at it is to look at what is the type of capability we’re trying to deliver. Is it really just an enhancement to your, to a backend process in the supply chain world because if it is, then that can absolutely continue to flow through the legacy mode one where you have interim releases and you fund all those and there is no driver to have an imminent build or an imminent delivery of that capability. So I think that’s the first thing. The other one is that content value. We touched on this a little bit briefly earlier before the break and I’d like to get into that a little bit more.

Sahal Lahar [00:11:29]:
A lot of times there’s a misconception that in mode two you really have no governance on your hand. The teams can just go at speed of light and get things done and deliver everything and I think that is the number one pitfall is bimodal. It really requires, it still requires rigor and maybe you can go with slightly lighter governance in some areas, but the governance feeds are still very important and likewise the alignment in terms of your executive team or your business sponsors and leaders within each of your functional areas. Everyone really needs to be aligned with what are the priorities that we’re working on and how are these priorities going to be delivered and how do they drive us to the and to get to the next level. So cost attributes differ between mode one and mode two and I think the key things that are different is that in mode one you have low uncertainty, in mode two you have high uncertainty

Sahal Lahar [00:12:42]:
and as such, because you have high uncertainty, what you’ll find is that you are looking at a more innovative culture, a more innovative mindset that requires not just your internal talents to be recruited accordingly, but fourthly, it’s the external partners that you work with. In mode two, you’re more likely to work with the smaller vendors that startups the next layers, the boutique firm. In mode one, typically people work with the more tried and trusted vendors and proven vendors and then obviously there’s also the, in terms of the failure rate, in mode one, it’s typically a low failure rate because there’s a long planning period and it addresses the risk and allows for testing and various iterations. The issue with mode 2 that organizations really has to adopt in terms of the mindset is that it’s more of a fail fast, fail forward and fail small and so you really need to time buff each idea or each initiative to get a set period of time.

Sahal Lahar [00:13:58]:
and within that timeframe, if you’ve been unable to achieve what you’re trying to do, then you need to go back and really evaluate if this is an initiative you need to move forward with. So I think these are some of the things that, because it’s a new way of thinking. It’s really, like I said, ultra a big shift and it’s not that in the old world people did not want to be transformant, but to transform or be innovative but it was done with different, it was done with different levers and it was done with a different mindset.

Sanjog Aul [00:14:31]:
So since this is such an internal to IT type of reorganization or change management, do you see any health assistance and sponsorship needed from outside and blessing for that matter from outside, other stakeholders besides the folks within it for this to become successful?

Sahal Lahar [00:14:51]:
Absolutely, I think this is, that is maybe one of the other misconceptions that bimodel IT is, because of the way that the term has been coined and with IT in the name that it’s really something internal to the IT organization but really I Think it requires enterprise wide mindset shift to recognize that we are now going to be working in a different way to recognize that circuit initiatives are going to flow through the alternative delivery model where we will be more agile and we will be less restricted. There will be more of a focus on innovation and rapid delivery, rapid prototyping speed to market and I think that alignment ultimately you still have to work with the entire executive team as far as managing the portfolio of initiatives so that everyone understands which initiative goes through which path and similarly I think the other key thing is if you are going to do bimodal IT your the themes that you develop for mode two, which is the new agile way of development and delivery, those really have to be cross functional theme, because you need business involvement and the business has to also adopt this alternative way of working because if they used to the old way of working where, you take off a waterfall type project and you tell them hey, here’s the key activities we’re working on and is there the input from you are going to come in these phases. It seeks and values to that and then in the values, the business can really go back and go back to their day job. In bimodal

Sahal Lahar [00:16:43]:
they really don’t have that luxury because we’re continuously innovating and we’re continuously prototyping something or testing something or working on defining something. So that really needs to be something that is not just an IT initiative because if it is then you will not be there for.

Sanjog Aul [00:17:06]:
So if you are to look at the specific areas in which you feel we may be looking at, we will be looking. We will be re evaluating how we work in within IT and in terms of how we interact with business. When we are trying to adopt bimodal which would be the top candidates.

Sahal Lahar [00:17:29]:
So I would say the top candidates would really be I think again to me it starts with culture, and so you really have to define this new mode and define how it’s going to affect your culture and it starts with everything from talent acquisition and how you staff up certain organization that to me is top one is first and foremost and then once you have that then you really need to move into figuring out the governance model coming to a balance around. You can’t have the exact same governance as you’ve had in the past because like traditionally on project if you go with kind of the full project management and governance, you’re probably consuming about 10% of the project recourses in the new world you have to be leaner from a governance standpoint, but people have the right controls in place. So that’s where effectively evaluating the initiatives as they move along.

Sanjog Aul [00:18:33]:
If you are to look at the culture which needs to be in place, like a set of prerequisites, if you will, before you kick something off, what would need to be in place where you feel, okay, if I’m going to ask for a change like any other change management, we should have the core to be in place. What would that core look like?

Sahal Lahar [00:18:54]:
I think the core is really being open minded and recognizing that innovation is going to force us to work differently and if we’re serious about innovating and transforming rapidly, then we are going to have to work in a very different way than we’ve been accustomed to. So I think that’s really the, that’s really where it starts and I think the other piece is the one that I mentioned earlier, which is you have to also change the culture from one where in the past any kind of failure in some organizations is seen as a very negative thing. Whereas you have to recognize that now in bimodal, when you’re working in mode two, there is going to be, there are going to be initiatives that are not successful. Every single thing for you, every single innovative idea you come up with is not going to go into production and hit your customer facing systems. They are going to be ones that are just not right for the organization. You may start off with an idea that you think is a great idea, but after you, you create the prototype and you work on it further, you’ll realize that it’s really just not aligned with your organization for whatever reason

Sahal Lahar [00:20:16]:
and in those situations you have to foster a culture where you know the failing path and moving on is okay and that we are going to fail, we’re going to fail forward, fail small and not the labor stuff and try to put a square peg in a round hole and keep working on it longer, than the amount of timeframe because then you know you will not be meeting any of your objectives under the thieves delivery model.

Sanjog Aul [00:20:49]:
Let’s take a quick break listeners. We’ll be right back and Sahal, let’s talk about the specific set of resistance or objections that people may have raised which you had to get over or convince them otherwise so that they came on board for something like this because this is going to change the way they worked, the role they took on, the hours they worked, the quality and quantity of work that will be put on their plate. All of that would change as a result of this transformation. So what objections were the ones for which you had to deal with to get on the bandwagon. Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:22:24]:
Welcome back. So what resistance, that’s what I we wanted to understand is what resistance and or objections that people bring up who were part of this team inside who would get affected and or people outside who may eventually be from business or from executive management. What did they bring up and how did you handle them?

Sahal Lahar [00:22:45]:
Absolutely, so I think the first one is really just the being nimble and the time element. Everyone is not accustomed to working in that model. So as soon as you shift the paradigm from the old world and say, hey, we’re now going from long cycle times, which used to be months, to short cycle times, which are weeks and in some cases even days, to work on these new innovative capabilities, that immediately raises flag and there are people that will just question the ability for the organization to move that path and they will create barriers to say we’re going to have poor testing. If you’re cutting the cycle time, we’re going to have poor deliverables because we’re not spending the right amount of time and the right rigor but really it’s helping them to understand that you really are still providing rigor in the process. It’s not that you get free rein to go work on these initiatives and not do testing and not define them correctly up front. Quite the contrary.

Sahal Lahar [00:23:59]:
it’s just that your focus shifts from a typical, if we think about the ERP world in the old days when people were doing ERP project, one ERP project, let’s say, took 12 months to deliver a single release. The reason for that is not because there was the one capability that was complex, but really you were bundling numerous capabilities and some were complex and others were not and here you really are isolating capabilities and working on them individually and really once you have completed one, then you move on to the next one. So if you were to extrapolate the 12 month timeline from a traditional ERP implementation and you take that into the digital world. Now with the delivery of these innovative solutions in mode 2, you still spending time and you’re still spending cycles on definition and dancing and getting alignment from your business partners, but you’re concentrating that into a much shorter period of time. Well, I think that is where a lot of the turmoil starts

Sahal Lahar [00:25:11]:
but I think the other one is really getting that business involvement because I think that again there’s a misconception that you can do bimodal IT and run all of this stuff in mode two and it’s business as usual for the functional teams and the business owners but that is not the case either. As we talked about earlier, you have to be very close to a customer. The customer or business owner needs to be very hands on and very involved. It’s really more of a business centric way of working when the traditional world it really could be more IT centric because it doesn’t have to handle the setup requirements and then go away and you wouldn’t need to really engage with them again until you got into the development or pieces of the testing, et cetera. So I think those are two key ones, but I think the other one is really just the ability to work with ambiguity and again, some people need very prescribed and predictable outcomes on projects and a very predictable set of depth.

Sahal Lahar [00:26:18]:
You really have to hand pick folks that are good at new and uncertain projects and they’re okay with the ambiguity, they’re more nimble and react dynamically on the fly as things change because every single initiative you deliver under mode 2 is not going to have the same prescribe that with some you’ll be able to get the depth and others you’ll have maybe additional steps that you have to take. So I think these are some of the key barriers from a people standpoint but one other point I would like to make is that this is also all predicated on the fact that you have a digitally enabled core and what I mean by that is that if you’re a 100% mainframe shop and you now try and introduce bimodal IT that came to be only marginally effective because your underlying infrastructure and your underlying systems and processes really are just not digitally enabled and therefore regardless of the great number of ideas and capabilities you come up with, and those will not, you will not be in a position where you’ll be able to deliver those back into the systems, underlying systems, because of the inherent constraints in some of these whole discord and legacy platforms.

Sahal Lahar [00:27:43]:
So that’s also a very important piece and I think that comes back to another question you had asked around. When do I adopt bimodal IT as a reader or as a CIO or any kind of old agent, when do we do that and I think you really have to be very honest with yourself about how not just your people are able to handle it, but also your underlying systems and your underlying processes. If you’re not just as much as a systems issue, but if you’re an extremely bureaucratic organization with a lot of red tape and five sets of approvals that are needed for every change to move to production, then you’re going to have to rethink all of that before you adopt bimodel.

Sanjog Aul [00:28:28]:
When anyone, any organization would start or any leader will take this on, they would have some idea about where they are supposed to get to. What’s that Holy grail? So what would you say is a set of measures of success that you would put in place and then measure when you have reached there or if you’ve not reached there, what’s the way to correct course as we go through this journey and what are those measures of success someone can put in?

Sahal Lahar [00:28:56]:
Yes, absolutely, so I would say that it really needs to start with looking at first defining the right governance model and once you have the right governance model, then the key metric and attributes that will be part of your governance process that will allow you to assess the success of your initiative in the new way of working. So as an example, when we talk about some of these attributes, you obviously have to look at business outcomes, you have to look at past the time to market of the prototypes with the features and really looking at how do we maximize the business impact of technology and in order to really evaluate your progress on this journey, you have to have very specific metric and attribute that you’re looking at in terms of what is it? It all starts with the time period. I think every you have to, when you start this journey, I think it’s helpful to say each idea gets a set number of days and that is the construct that you go into this way because again coming back to my point earlier, if you keep trying to belabor an idea because it didn’t initially work, let’s say within your 5 day allotments or your 10 day allotments of where you were doing these prototypes, then you really need to cut bait on that particular idea and move on and I think that key challenge here is that it is not black and white in terms of being able to gauge your success

Sahal Lahar [00:30:39]:
because for all of the initiatives that you’re successful with, there will be a percentage that you had to punt on and the one that you had to punt on really, ultimately if you look at a traditional ROI analysis where you look at a traditional way of measuring success, it would be what is the impact that Initiative X had on the business and the reality is that in this way of working there are ones that didn’t work at all and so there was zero impact or zero ROI. You really have to balance your evaluation process and your metric to say, what is it that we’re trying to do and to me the best way to do that is to look at your overall strategic priorities and ultimately you should be continuing to evaluate every single initiative against a strategic priority or strategic initiative and just make sure that you have that alignment and as you move, you have to continue to enforce the set number of days, you have to enforce the governance and you really also have to be able to have, you have to understand that you won’t be able to check every box that you didn’t check in the legacy world. So you’re not going to have detailed requirements and effects to the same level of detail that you had in the old world

Sahal Lahar [00:32:12]:
but you really have to say that you have to develop according to specific characteristics and employee method that are now new and different from the way that you worked in the past. So there’s really, I think this is a tough one because again, I don’t think it’s a black and white thing where I can just set, rattle off five metrics and say evaluate these and you’ll be fine but a lot of these are have thought benefit and so the evaluation of success is a lot more balanced between art and science.

Sanjog Aul [00:32:53]:
So since you mentioned that, and that is at least a candid approach to recognizing that not everything is. You don’t have a crystal ball essentially. Now that does have an impact on the way you build a business case. The way you get become the pied viper where everybody follows you because there is not a hundred percent clarity but then coming to who do you choose for the mode 1 or mode 2, that becomes an issue and then another one is to say, okay, now that I’ve lived through this journey, the chaos or the uncertainty, if I had to relive this journey again and knowing That I would not know everything exactly. What would you have done differently? One is how to choose people, second is how to work with them to make this happen differently.

Sahal Lahar [00:33:38]:
Absolutely, so I think on the people one, a very good litmus test is that your team in mode one, I would say, needs to have an operator mindset and your team in mode two needs to have an innovator mindset. So that I think is the most fundamental thing you need to look at when you’re building the team is that what is this individual’s core capability? Are they more of an operator and someone that needs kind of predictable depth and outcomes, or are they more of an innovator and risk taker and someone that’s willing to work with ambiguity and embrace it and forge their own path as they go? Well, I think it really starts with that. I think the question you talk about in terms of one of the key learnings, that if I were to do it all over again, I think what I would share in that regard is that you really can’t mix mode on the same team. You have to keep teams separate but I think sometimes the risk is that when you’re getting started, you really want to have, you want to start small, because you can’t go through like a big bang approach and just have no mode to one day and have fully launched mode 2 on the subsequent day but sometimes the pitfall with starting small is that some of your team members will wear multiple hats and I think that is problematic because then it takes away from the focus that is required and the way of working on

Sahal Lahar [00:35:15]:
mode 2 as well as mode 1 are inherently different and so you must make sure that I think you start with more with just one or two projects and you have very clearly differentiate which projects are going through but once you’ve differentiated the project, you also clearly articulate which of your resources are working on which mode and ensure that that both mode are working towards the aligned priorities because ultimately that’s very easy sometimes to lose track often if you get more into the shadow IT or stealth IT mode, which is someone has an idea and they just think it’s a cool idea and they want to do it without really seeing if it’s even aligned with the strategic impact or strategic priorities rather for this year. So those I think are some of the things that I would share and I think the other one is, the other thing I would say is don’t wait till

Sahal Lahar [00:36:14]:
you have a perfectly defined model or a perfectly constructed theme. I think I would encourage everyone to start sooner rather than later. Start more and I would also just emphasize everyone being open and collaborative regardless of which mode you work on because ultimately that that collaboration communication is extremely important to the success core initiative.

Sanjog Aul [00:36:38]:
Let’s take a quick break listeners. We’ll be right back and let’s talk about the risks because any such initiative that you have, definitely you start because you feel that there are benefits and you see some of them as soft other as hard benefits in terms of dollars and other value that it could create. Now we also have to balance risk and what risk are we talking about here, is it security risk, is it any other form of uncertainty that we may introduce within the people or the processes or technology in the process, so explore all of that and with an underlying tone of risk management. Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:38:16]:
Welcome back. So risk management, take it away.

Sahal Lahar [00:38:22]:
So I would say that the risk really, the biggest risk here is with confidence because if you are not, if you don’t have, a good dollar in pocket, then you have the tendency to maybe have the meter running and dollars burning with nothing to show for it and that’s why having the set number of days for a particular idea or initiative I think is very important because you really have to have train it up, for instance, and based on what you find in that period of time you go with you, it gauges where you go with the initiative. So in addition to parts, I think the other risk here is when you first get started there, the popes that are new to this way of working may feel overwhelmed and feel like they’re being spread too thin and in that world, if you end up not delivering anything well because you don’t have the right focus and so again, what I would say on this is that it’s extremely important to have very clear roles and responsibilities and identify who’s working on a particular initiative and really have accountability around accountability that’s tied back to whether or not you’re meeting a business goal or strategic priority. So I think the almost the other things that I think about as risk would be having the mode 2 team get too big, too bad and I think that it’s important that you keep the mode 2 team small and you really keep them very focused because when you again, when you’re getting started, you have to start, you have to start small but in addition to that, I would say that the ranking of initiatives or ideas really should be taken outside of the project team because Those people in mode 2 really need to be focused on initiatives that have already been prioritized by the executive team or some other governance body that says here’s what we want to focus on, rather than having the mode 2 team being brought down by doing prioritization as well as then trying to execute on these initiatives

Sahal Lahar [00:40:41]:
and then I think another common problem is that because each initiative can be very different and can vary greatly in terms of what it is that you’re trying to deliver or what part of the business it’s touching, there’s a tendency sometimes for teams to wait time in waiting for everyone to get up to speed and what I would say with that is that you can address it with really an upfront onboarding process and the onboarding process really would be focused on the idea owners spending time with the team for that particular initiative in talking through the the initiative and describing the tasks that they believe we have to go through and I think this is extremely important and some people have said that every hour that you spend on onboarding saves you five to six hours of actual work effort down the road because you’re really helping people to get up to speed and set expectations very clearly up front. So I think these are some of the key risks that I would share based on what I’ve seen with our own application of this and again, hopefully that that is helpful to everyone to look at these and to avoid making these mistakes.

Sanjog Aul [00:42:01]:
Now, one last question about the leader. The very leadership that they have to demonstrate in order for them to initiate, manage this transition into, bimodal IT and run it successfully. What traits should get introduced or reinforced as a leader?

Sahal Lahar [00:42:19]:
Absolutely, so I think you have to be, the leader has to be very dynamic, very nimble and must be a true change agent that can navigate through ambiguity and to really drive alignment across the organization because again, as we discussed, the initiatives are going to vary greatly and they’re going to need to build consensus and I think having good relationships with all of the business partners is, I think, extremely important but if I were to just summarize and prioritize the key traits, I think it really has to be someone that is very dynamic and not afraid of ambiguity.

Sanjog Aul [00:42:58]:
On behalf of the show and our listeners, I’d really like to thank you, Sahal, for sharing your thoughts on how organizations can make the best use of this paradigm, which is bimodal IT and bring most value for the business.

Sahal Lahar [00:43:13]:
No problem.

Sanjog Aul [00:43:13]:
Thank you so much again.

Sahal Lahar [00:43:14]:
It’s a pleasure to be on the show.

Sanjog Aul [00:43:16]:
Listeners, please like us on Facebook, search for CTN, that is CIO Talk Network and be sure to follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn community. Thank you again for listening to this segment on CTN. This is Sanjog Aul your talk show host, till next week take care and god bless.

Contributors

Sahal Lahar

Sahal Lahar, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Brooks Brothers

Sahal is Chief Digital Officer and CIO of Destination XL Group. He has over 20 years of senior operational experience with a focus on digital and Omni-channel strategies. He is the principal architect and leader of DXL Group's digital com... More   View all posts
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Sahal Lahar