Find the thread

There is a widespread assumption in tech circles that privacy and (useful) AI are mutually exclusive. Apple is assumed to be behind Amazon and Google in this race because of its choice to do most data processing locally on the phone, instead of uploading users’ private data in bulk to the cloud.

A recent example of this attitude comes courtesy of The Register:

Predicting an eventual upturn in the sagging smartphone market, [Gartner] research director Ranjit Atwal told The Reg that while artificial intelligence has proven key to making phones more useful by removing friction from transactions, AI required more permissive use of data to deliver. An example he cited was Uber "knowing" from your calendar that you needed a lift from the airport.

I really, really resent this assumption that connecting these services requires each and every one of them to have access to everything about me. I might not want information about my upcoming flight shared with Uber – where it can be accessed improperly, leading to someone knowing I am away from home and planning a burglary at my house. Instead, I want my phone to know that I have an upcoming flight, and offer to call me an Uber to the airport. At that point, of course I am sharing information with Uber, but I am also getting value out of it. Otherwise, the only one getting value is Uber. They get to see how many people in a particular geographical area received a suggestion to take an Uber and declined it, so they can then target those people with special offers or other marketing to persuade them to use Uber next time they have to get to the airport.

I might be happy sharing a monthly aggregate of my trips with the government – so many by car, so many on foot, or by bicycle, public transport, or ride sharing service – which they could use for better planning. I would absolutely not be okay with sharing details of every trip in real time, or giving every busybody the right to query my location in real time.

The fact that so much of the debate is taken up with unproductive discussions is what is preventing progress here. I have written about this concept of granular privacy controls before:

The government sets up an IDDB which has all of everyone's information in it; so far, so icky. But here's the thing: set it up so that individuals can grant access to specific data in that DB - such as the address. Instead of telling various credit card companies, utilities, magazine companies, Amazon, and everyone else my new address, I just update it in the IDDB, and bam, those companies' tokens automatically update too - assuming I don't revoke access in the mean time.

This could also be useful for all sorts of other things, like marital status, insurance, healthcare, and so on. Segregated, granular access to the information is the name of the game. Instead of letting government agencies and private companies read all the data, users each get access only to those data they need to do their jobs.

Unfortunately, we are stuck in an stale all-or-nothing discussion: either you surround yourself with always-on internet-connected microphones and cameras, or you might as well retreat to a shack in the woods. There is a middle ground, and I wish more people (besides Apple) recognised that.

Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

I just attended¹ the Gartner Data Center, Infrastructure & Operations Management Summit in London. It was an interesting event, as ever; Gartner events are expensive for both exhibitors and attendees, but they are also the highest-value events around.

With all the excitement there has been about Gartner’s "bimodal IT" concept, I was curious to see whether they would double down, or whether the original idea would be modified in any way.

Given that this was the sixth slide of the opening keynote, I think it’s safe to say that they are not giving up on bimodal:

As is often the case with these high-level structures, hearing it explained by its practitioners helps with reaching a deeper understanding of what bimodal IT actually means. The concern that many people have with the soundbite version of bimodal IT is that it will devolve into "two-speed" IT, with one well-funded group forging ahead with new technologies while the other scrounges around for scrap to keep old creaking systems alive. Of course nobody with any sense would want to be in the latter group, and therefore there will be substantial brain drain between the two.

After spending two days listening to Gartner analysts, whether during formal presentations, in our briefings, or just hanging out during the evening reception, I think I can safely say that there is a bit more subtlety going on here.

What does the business need?

Just a few slides further into the keynote, we have this one:

It is clear that Gartner are trying to move the conversation beyond the details of which technology fits into which category. Once you move the focus to the business outcome, talking about Mode 1 and Mode 2 technologies is a short-hand for some of their characteristics.

Throughout the conference, Gartner people used the terms in this way, talking about the varying levels of agility of the different approaches, but always in terms of the business goals that are being enabled.

It’s unfortunate to my mind that "bimodal" has become such a hot-button topic, because that is absolutely a conversation that needs to be had. If you start "moving fast and breaking things", where those "things" support critical aspects of the business, pretty soon you’re going to find an angry mob of front-line people bearing down on the IT department, waving torches and pitchforks and calling for the head of the idiot who changed something they relied on just because it let them refactor something into something else more technically pleasing to them.

Instead, the public conversation has pretty much stopped at this binary opposition between boring, uncool Mode 1 that gets starved of resources, and cool, shiny Mode 2 that gets all the love.

As I have pointed out before, this misses the time-based aspect. Just because something is all the rage now, and genuinely needs to evolve quickly to respond to rapidly changing business needs, does not mean that will always be the case.

Don’t get stuck in the past

Where I do encounter visibly un-appreciated IT teams, without resources or standing, that is because somebody somewhere missed that key transition. Instead of their job being "supporting the business", in their minds the job description has become "provisioning servers" or "deploying patches" or whatever.

The Gartner people do call out this attitude - see this slide, from that same keynote:

I encounter this type of push-back all the time, pushing a new solution that is disruptive to the existing process. IT people need to be persuaded of the value of changing something that is known to work. The mantra is "if it ain’t broke, don’t mess with it" - and for very good reason! There is a point, though, when that precautionary attitude crosses over and becomes full-blown reactionary.

A good sanity check is to go through this deck from a presentation by Casey West, and see if you recognise yourself or your routine activities.

I get it, it’s highly technical work, it takes time, you’ll notice it if it goes wrong - but ultimately, the main metric - the only metric that matters - is whether IT delivered the outcome that the business required.

Behind the scenes, we IT people need to figure out all sorts of things, but we need to recognise that, to the business, this is about as interesting as the facilities maintenance. Sure, if the bins don’t get emptied or the lift plummets down its shaft, that would be bad, but as long as everything is humming along nicely, it’s invisible. To the business, IT is the same: as long as business outcomes are being achieved, all is well, and if the business result isn’t there, nothing else matters.

Arguing about what is Mode 1 and Mode 2 is to miss the point

The ongoing argument about bimodal IT is a mirror image of the ITIL conversation. ITIL is a useful roadmap, but it goes bad when people are so focused on the map that they start to try to adapt reality to the map. In the case of bimodal IT, nobody is actually suggesting that organisations split their organisations into two and starve Peter to pay Paula. Instead, the notion of bimodal IT is a useful short-hand to talk about existing realities within IT.

Once the time factor is added, bimodal IT is not that different from pace layering, but that model never really seemed to catch on - perhaps because it was overly complex and dynamic. Instead, we are (still) arguing about how bimodal is too binary and static. After spending time actually talking to Gartner people about this stuff, I recognise it as a description of a spectrum, and one that is dynamic. A particular technology will move along the spectrum over time, and that movement needs to be recognised in the processes that deal with that particular technology.

Now that’s taken care of, we can all go back to arguing about private cloud.