IT Standards Manifesto

It’s hard to imagine how establishing and communicating corporate IT standards within an enterprise won’t, at the very least, result in significant, measurable hard dollar savings.

When I use the term IT standards, I'm not referring to de facto or de jure industry IT standards, such as those published by standards organizations like:

• ISO - International Standards Organization
• IEEE-SA (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association)
• NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology)
  
• W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

Industry standards such as 802, X12, HTTP, SQL, DNS, and scores more just like these, are literally indispensable to the computing industry. They represent the very essence of goodness. But those aren't the standards I'm talking about. Rather, my comments pertain to products selected as internal corporate standards, like a standard relational DBMS, or a standard application server, or a standard desktop operating system.

It doesn’t matter what performance metric you choose to measure, you’ll find that standardizing will improve your enterprise’s efficiency by lowering costs, shortening cycle times, and reducing staffing. Simultaneously, standardization, coupled with consolidation, will increase IT effectiveness.

Standards really do enable an IT organization to do more with less. If you want a responsive, agile IT organization, then adopt a simplified, streamlined, less complex, standardized computing environment.