How DevOps and Bimodal IT Accelerate Digital Transformation in Banking

About 540 million years ago, the Cambrian explosion marked a sudden burst of life on Earth; a similar burst of growth occurred in the digital realm in 2014 when The Economist coined the "Cambrian Moment" to describe the rapid rise of tech startups leveraging digital advantages.

Digital Transformation in a New Era

These data illustrate not just market prosperity but intense competition, with consumers demanding constant innovation and new business needs emerging at high frequency. Companies that successfully digitize gain new customers and markets, while those that cannot adapt risk extinction, echoing the 49% species loss at the end of the Cambrian period.

Digital transformation is a critical inflection point: firms that advance it capture new opportunities, while others may disappear under competitive pressure.

Strategic shifts bring new customers and demands, but firms may fail to sense or respond quickly.

Competitors constantly forge new collaborations, leaving laggards behind.

Massive data accumulation often fails to drive decisions and can overload IT systems, threatening core operations.

Gartner introduced Bimodal IT in 2014, defining two distinct IT work modes:

Mode 1 – "Steady State": Focuses on predictability, maintaining stable core services through known knowledge and experience.

Mode 2 – "Agile State": Emphasizes exploratory work, rapid response, and high scalability, requiring close collaboration between business and IT.

Enterprises must preserve steady-state stability while adopting flexible, agile practices. A prime example is Toyota, which, after the post‑Korean War economic boom, introduced the Toyota Production System (TPS), pioneering lean management and just‑in‑time production—principles that later evolved into modern agile development and DevOps.

TPS, created by Taiichi Ohno, aims for low cost, high efficiency, high quality, and maximum customer satisfaction, built on two pillars—just‑in‑time and employee autonomy—and a foundation of continuous improvement.

The core idea across these methods is waste avoidance. Product development involves stages (requirement, design, development, testing, deployment, monitoring) where each stage depends on the previous one; waiting wastes time and resources. By breaking tasks into smaller units, teams can start earlier, mirroring agile development principles.

DevOps serves as the role that oversees the entire workflow, enabling rapid, coordinated delivery—one of the best practices of Bimodal IT.

Banking Technology Leaders

Banking offers valuable lessons for overcoming the tension between frequent business changes and traditional siloed structures. Agile fintech firms pressure banks to innovate, prompting traditional banks to adopt DevOps for faster product delivery.

Case 1: Nanjing Bank builds a real‑time liquidity management tool in 3 days using the SmartView module of the BPC performance management product. Operators drag‑and‑drop components without coding, achieving instant deployment and providing executives with live transaction metrics, enabling T+0 liquidity risk management.

Case 2: A city commercial bank creates a real‑time business monitoring app that aggregates core transaction performance across business lines. The app triggers alerts when metrics fall below thresholds, allowing seamless handoff between operations and development, and unifying the full development‑test‑deploy‑monitor lifecycle.

The BPC product’s underlying network bypass technology enables cross‑business monitoring without modifying applications, automatically decoding traffic to discover inter‑module relationships, thus supporting agile development and continuous deployment.

SmartView empowers operators with no‑code development, shrinking development cycles from months to days and facilitating DevOps implementation.

From the Tortoise and the Hare to Relay Collaboration: DevOps Unlocks Digital Potential

In a fast‑changing market, user‑centric, rapid response is essential; competition demands constant idea generation and new business insights; and the future remains unpredictable, making change the only constant.

Successful digital transformation requires breaking down departmental silos, treating operations as the relay anchor that connects business to technology, and leveraging agile and DevOps practices to achieve continuous delivery and faster reaction to market shifts.

While agile and DevOps bring speed, they also introduce pressures; looking ahead, artificial intelligence (AI) will further reshape work, presenting both challenges and opportunities.