IT professionals continue to debate the benefits of standardization versus the benefits of innovation, and the potential of standards inhibiting engineer and software developer ability to develop creative solutions to business opportunities and challenges. At the Open Group Conference in San Diego last week (3~5 February) the topic of standards and innovation popped up not only in presentations, but also in sidebar conversations surrounding the conference venue.
In his presentation SOA4BT (Service-Oriented Architecture for Business Technology) – From Business Services to Realization, Nikhil Kumar noted that with rigid standards there is “always a risk of service units creating barriers to business units.” The idea is that service and IT organizations must align their intended use of standards with the needs of the business units. Kumar further described a traditional cycle where:
- Enterprise drivers establish ->
- Business derived technical drivers, which encounter ->
- Legacy and traditional constraints, which result in ->
- “Business Required” technologies and technology (enabled) SOAs
Going through this cycle does not require a process with too much overhead, it is simply a requirement for ensuring the use of a standard, or standard business architecture framework drive the business services groups (IT) into the business unit circle. While IT is the source of many innovative ideas and deployments of emerging technologies, the business units are the ultimate benefactors of innovation, allowing the unit to address and respond to rapidly emerging opportunities or market requirements.
Standards come in a lot of shapes and sizes. One standard may be a national or international standard, such as ISO 20000 (service delivery), NIST 800-53 (security), or BICSI 002-2011 (data center design and operations). Standards may also be internal within an organization or industry, such as standardizing data bases, applications, data formats, and virtual appliances within a cloud computing environment.
In his presentation “The Implications of EA in New Audit Guidelines (COBIT5), Robert Weisman noted there are now more than 36,500 TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework) certified practitioners worldwide, with more than 60 certified training organizations providing TOGAF certifications. According to ITSMinfo.com, just in 2012 there were more than 263,000 ITIL Foundation certifications granted (for service delivery), and ISACA notes there were more than 4000 COBIT 5 certifications granted (for IT planning, implementation, and governance) in the same period.
With a growing number of organizations either requiring, or providing training in enterprise architecture, service delivery, or governance disciplines, it is becoming clear that organizations need to have a more structured method of designing more effective service-orientation within their IT systems, both for operational efficiency, and also for facilitating more effective decision support systems and performance reporting. The standards and frameworks attempt to provide greater structure to both business and IT when designing technology toolsets and solutions for business requirements.
So use of standards becomes very effective for providing structure and guidelines for IT toolset and solutions development. Now to address the issue of innovation, several ideas are important to consider, including:
- Developing an organizational culture of shared vision, values, and goals
- Developing a standardized toolkit of virtual appliances, interfaces, platforms, and applications
- Accepting a need for continual review of existing tools, improvement of tools to match business requirements, and allow for further development and consideration when existing utilities and tools are not sufficient or adequate to task
Once an aligned vision of business goals is available and achieved, a standard toolset published, and IT and business units are better integrated as teams, additional benefits may become apparent.
- Duplication of effort is reduced with the availability of standardized IT tools
- Incompatible or non-interoperable organizational data is either reduced or eliminated
- More development effort is applied to developing new solutions, rather than developing basic or standardized components
- Investors will have much more confidence in management’s ability to not only make the best use of existing resources and budgets, but also the organization’s ability to exploit new business opportunities
- Focusing on a standard set of utilities and applications, such as database software, will not only improve interoperability, but also enhance the organization’s ability to influence vendor service-level agreements and support agreements, as well as reduce cost with volume purchasing
Rather than view standards as an inhibitor, or barrier to innovation, business units and other organizational stakeholders should view standards as a method of not only facilitating SOAs and interoperability, but also as a way of relieving developers from the burden of constantly recreating common sets and libraries of underlying IT utilities. If developers are free to focus their efforts on pure solutions development and responding to emerging opportunities, and rely on both technical and process standardization to guide their efforts, the result will greatly enhance an organization’s ability to be agile, while still ensuring a higher level of security, interoperability, systems portability, and innovation.
