Why adopt public cloud if it is relatively more expensive than on premise IT?  An answer for many is the agility it affords to try new things and deliver business change more quickly.  Failing fast and failing often is a mantra often cited by businesses wishing to be more innovative.  The challenge then is to find a balance between having the ability to try new things at an elevated cost and then transitioning the things that work into a BAU ‘run’ mode at a more effective cost model.  Seed funding is often used to get these ideas off the ground, but if the mechanism for releasing the funding is via traditional procurement processes it may well not deliver the agility required to fail fast.

This is where adaptive sourcing and having a model that helps to direct procurement decisions based on the service required is so important to underpin Digital Transformation efforts – indeed Gartner highlight adaptive sourcing as part of building a bi modal capability:

http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2740317

Where this has become very apparent for me is when dealing with the marketing functions of the organisation is that they need to be able to try things quickly as there are a lot of start-ups, especially in the digital / social media space that allows companies to interact with customers more dynamically.  To take advantage of these opportunities you don’t really want to get pulled into a three month long procurement process around the due diligence of the health of the organisation you are engaging with, putting them on your finance systems etc, especially if these are relatively low value interactions.  Where bi-modal IT describes two speed IT, the peripheral business functions that support IT such as finance, risk, information security etc, also need to create bi modal process that support this new delivery paradigm.

More proof if any were needed that cloud and digital transformation are not limited to IT, or even IT and Marketing areas.  Other business functions like finance, procurement and legal all need to play their part in adapting to support the businesses efforts to engage with their customers.  Change is difficult at the best of times and organisational change is not something that happens over night.