Bimodal IT Organizations

Contact person: Kristina Kusanke

Problem:

Digital transformation requires companies to focus more than before on IT-supported innovations. At the same time, the enterprise IT function must ensure stable and reliable operation of the underlying digital assets for the core business and these transformational undertakings. As a result, IT functions face multiple challenges stemming from changing expectations of their role within an organization.

Management researchers talk about the need for IT functions to be able to balance exploratory and exploitative activities in order to achieve so-called strategic ambidextry. In most cases, traditionally structured organizational structures are no longer able to meet these conflicting requirements (Haffke et al., 2017). CIOs are therefore challenged to develop new organizational structures that simultaneously ensure agility and high reliability (Leonhardt et al., 2017).

A relatively new model of organizational structure driven by practitioners and adopted by academia is the concept of bimodal IT (Haffke et al., 2017). The state of bimodality is defined by Gartner as "the practice of managing two separate, coherent modes of IT delivery, one focused on stability and the other on agility" (Gartner, 2014).

Academic work on bimodal IT has provided important insights at the organizational level, particularly on the design of such an organizational structure (Haffke et al., 2017; Horlach et al., 2017), its influencing factors (e.g., Syed et al., 2020), and associated governance mechanisms (Jöhnk et al., 2019). Other lines of research focus on the utility of this phenomenon as an organizational tool (e.g., Fischer et al., 2020, Ruecker et al., 2020) and the associated challenges at the organizational and individual levels (Jöhnk et al., 2019).

To date, however, there is no firm evidence on the success-critical role of individual personality factors within bimodal IT organizations. Based on the Personality-Job-Fit-Theory, the aim of this dissertation project is to conduct a qualitative-quantitative study on the relationship between personality types and job satisfaction in bimodal IT organizations. From this, concrete recommendations for CIO's can be derived, which personality types are to be preferred for which (mono- or bimodal) task. Conversely, the research results should sensitize IT professionals to the areas of a bimodal IT in which they have the best individual fit in order to ensure the highest possible job satisfaction.

Sources:

• Fischer, Thomas; Jaeger, Karin; and Riedl, René (2020) „Coping with Rapid Changes in IT: An Update“, AIS Transactions on Replication Research: Vol. 6 , Article 2. DOI: 10.17705/1atrr.00045
• Gartner (2014). Bimodal IT: „How to Be Digitally Agile Without Making a Mess“. Gartner Research. Retrieved July 19, 2021, from https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/2798217/bimodal-ithow-to-be-digitally-agile-without-making-a-me
• Haffke, Ingmar; Kalgovas, Bradley; and Benlian, Alexander (2017) „Options for Transforming the IT Function Using Bimodal IT“, MIS Quarterly Executive: Vol. 16 : Iss. 2 , Article 2.
• Horlach, B., P. Drews, I. Schirmer and T. Böhmann (2017). „Increasing the Agility of IT Delivery: Five Types of Bimodal IT Organization.“ In: 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, p. 5420–5429.
• Jöhnk, Jan; Oesterle, Severin; Winkler, Till J.; Nørbjerg, Jacob; and Urbach, Nils, (2019). „Juggling the Paradoxes – Governance Mechanisms in Bimodal it Organizations“. In Proceedings of the 27th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), Stockholm & Uppsala, Sweden, June 8-14, 2019. ISBN 978-1-7336325-0-8 Research Papers.
• Leonhardt, Daniel; Haffke, Ingmar; Kranz, Johann; and Benlian, Alexander, (2017). „Reinventing the it Funnction: the Role of it Agility and it Ambidexterity in Supporting Digital Business Transformation“. In Proceedings of the 25th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), Guimarães, Portugal, June 5-10, 2017 (pp. 968-984). ISBN 978-989-20-7655-3 Research Papers.
• Rueckel, D., Muehlburger, M. & Koch, S. (2020). „An Updated Framework of Factors Enabling Digital Transformation“. Pacific Asia Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 12(4), 1-26.
• Syed, Tahir Abbas; Blome, Constantin; Papadopoulos, Thanos. „Resolving paradoxes in IT success through IT ambidexterity: The moderating role of uncertain environments“, Information & Management. Sep2020, Vol. 57 Issue 6