2nd Watch has completed a survey of more than 400 IT executives in the United States. The survey ran online the last week in January and sought to understand the organizational emphasis and strategic focus of modern enterprise IT departments based on the tech services they're consuming and how much they're spending.

The survey, Public Cloud Procurement: Packaging, Consumption and Management, began with the premise that many enterprise IT organizations today are "bimodal," meaning their focus is split between stability, which Gartner refers to as a Mode 1 approach, and agility, which Gartner calls Mode 2. Mode 1 organizations are traditional and sequential, emphasizing safety and accuracy. Mode 2 organizations are exploratory and nonlinear, emphasizing agility and speed.

In reference to IT procurement, Mode 1 buyers tend to prefer entire solutions over self-service. They have higher standards for security and governance, and favor a waterfall IT distribution approach. Mode 2 buyers, on the other hand, prefer self-service, even if it requires a higher-skilled employee to assemble different parts or vendors to arrive at a final solution. These buyers also have a higher tolerance for risk, and a decentralized IT procurement approach.

2nd Watch research indicates that bimodal IT is a fact of life for modern IT organizations. For starters, 71% of executives responding to 2nd Watch's survey said that Mode 1 best represents their IT organizations today. Additionally, 72% of respondents said they emphasize sequential processes and linear relationships -- a Mode 1 viewpoint -- over short feedback loops and clustered relationships (Mode 2) when it comes to IT delivery. Likewise, 65% said that plan-driven or top-down decision making best represented their company's planning processes.

And yet, there's considerable interest, according to 2nd Watch research, in public cloud technologies and outsourced management of said services among enterprise IT executives. For example, 89% of respondents said they use Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Compute Engine or Microsoft Azure. Another 39% claim to have dedicated up to 25% of total IT spend to public cloud. And 43% said that at least half their cloud service spend went to AWS.

Meanwhile, 34% of 2nd Watch survey respondents found that the process of buying, consuming and managing public cloud services was between somewhat and very difficult. Eighty-five percent said they'd pay a premium if the process of buying public cloud was easier, and 40% went so far as to say they'd be willing to pay 15% over cost for the benefit of an easier process.

"It seems clear that enterprise IT organizations have not abandoned so-called Mode 1 IT delivery, but it's also apparent that Mode 2 is coming on strong," says Jeff Aden, co-founder and EVP of marketing and strategic business development at 2nd Watch. "The research around adoption and spend on public cloud services matches what we're seeing from clients. They're actively leveraging these services to create digital products and services, and to reduce the cost and maintenance associated with delivering them. But still, the procurement and management processes are too complicated, which leads them to work with established partners like us."