Best Practices
IT standards can be used to transfer best known practices across industries.
Consistency
Creates consistency across an organization and industry.
Interoperability
A foundation for interoperability between platforms, systems and applications.
Security
Sharing knowledge about security practices across industries.
Compliance
Standards can help a firm to comply with regulations and laws.
Vendor Independence
In theory, standards are vendor independent although they may somewhat bound you to the organization that issues the standard.
Industry Adoption
Standards that are rolled out broadly have been tried and tested by many operational deployments.
Competencies
Standards often provide a standard set of competencies that can be used to grow the maturity of an organization.
Knowledge
Allows knowledge to be shared across firms and industries.
Skills
Familiarity with standards can make skills more transferable across firms.
Cost Savings
Avoids the cost of developing proprietary practices that may be less interoperable and supportable.
Stakeholder Assurances
Provides assurances to employees, customers, partners and regulators that you're doing things in a reasonable way.
Examples
TCP/IP | A foundation for internet networking. |
HTTP | A foundation for web networking. |
HTML | A language for creating web pages. |
CSS | A language for web presentation and formatting. |
XML | A standard for encoding information as documents. |
ISO/IEC 27001 | Information security management systems. |
ISO/IEC 20000 | IT service management. |
ITIL | IT service management. |
ISO/IEC 19770 | Software asset management. |
Drawbacks
The following are possible drawback of standards:Standards can suffer from the abilene paradox whereby they encode groupthink. For example, members who were involved in defining the standard may view the standard as irrational.
Arguably encourages and rewards mediocrity or discourages original thinking.
Important for compatibility but not as useful where you want to establish competitive advantages.
The sense that some standards are too complex, bloated and impractical such that they increase costs and reduce agility.
| Overview: IT Standard | ||
Type | ||
Definition | A collection of concepts, rules, principals, techniques, processes, languages and templates that is designed to provide consistency to information technology. | |
Related Concepts | ||
