The whole area of standards is fraught with emotion. Nearly everyone in your organization
will have an opinion about what the company should do about operating systems,
applications, hardware, software acquisition, services and even system development life
cycles. Everyone. Even the people who have nothing to do with maintaining your
computing and communications environment will have strong opinions about when everyone
should move to the next version of Microsoft Office. In fact, discussions about
standards often take on epic proportions with otherwise sane professionals threatening to
fall on their swords if the organization doesn’t move to the newest version of Windows
(or Notes, or Exchange — or whatever).
It’s likely you’ve heard references to return on investment (ROI) and the total cost of
ownership (TCO) every time the subject of standards comes up. Let there be no
misunderstanding here: Environments with less rather than more variation will save
money. Or put another way, you have some choices. You can aspire to be sane or
insane.
What does business management really want here? Standards are a second-order business
driver. Most companies don’t associate standards-setting with business models,
processes, profits or losses. Whether the environment has one, five or 20 word
processing systems has probably seldom been associated with business performance: It’s
hard to link homogeneity with sales! But the fact remains that expenses are clearly
related to sales, and standards are closely related to expenses. Herein lies the
subtlety of standards and alignment.
What else does business management want? They want flexibility — and that is the real
argument against standards. If your environment doesn’t support the business computing or
communications processes the business feels it needs to compete, there will be loud
complaints. Business managers want to compute and communicate competitively. Standards
are often perceived as obstacles, not enablers.
Try out these standards questions:
- How varied is your current environment? How do you know?
- Do you know what it’s costing you to support a highly varied environment?
- What is your organization’s tolerance for governance of any kind? For standards
governance?
- Who’s in charge of standards in your organization? Who’s not?
- Is there business buy-in to the concept of standards and to the cost-effectiveness of
standards?
- Has your organization been audited for its compliance to standards? The
result?
- Do you have standard desktops, laptops and PDAs?
- Do you have a standard communications architecture?
- Do you have a standard applications architecture?
- Do you have standard hardware and software acquisition practices?
- Do you have standard design, development & project management standards?
The answers you give to these kinds of questions will reveal a lot about your attitudes
about standards, standards responsibility, authority and accountability — and whether
your chances of standardization are high, low or miserable.
If we’ve learned anything over the past few decades, it’s that standards are as much
about organizational structures, processes and cultures as they are about technology.
The ability to actually control computing and communications environments through
thoughtful governance policies and procedures will determine to a great extent how
standardized organizations become. We’ve also learned that the more you succeed the less
you’ll pay.
Elements of Standards Alignment
The elements of a standards alignment strategy appear in Figure 1.
Figure 1: The Elements of Standards Alignment
As always, everything needs to sync with your business strategy — assuming one exists.
If none exists, then make sure that you cover your political you-know-what. The real key
here is governance and the processes that make standards management effective. Without
serious support for a standardized environment, you’re toast. Clearly, less variation in
your platforms, applications, architectures, acquisition and disposition practices, and
life cycles will reduce your costs. And as always, you need to focus on what the
environment should look like in the next two to three years.
The following figure will help you implement your standards strategy. It offers cells in
a matrix that you can use to identify, define and prioritize requirements.
Note the distinction between the enterprise and the business division or units. This is
a killer distinction since it determines ultimately whether you succeed in your quest to
reduce variation in your environment. If you’re in a strong centralized organization
then your chances for success are much, much higher than they are if you’re in a
decentralized organization with a weak enterprise group responsible for infrastructure.
Put another way, it you’re in an organization that has a central CIO whose job is really
a “Chief Infrastructure Officer” and whose charter is full of authority holes then you’re
not likely to reduce variation in your environment. In fact, you’re likely to find
yourself suiting up for one standards crusade after another.