Why is the difference between "standardized" and "proprietary" so important in today's datacenters? We're in an age of commodity hardware, with shrinking margins for hardware vendors and a cloud environment where the hardware brand actually doesn't make much difference. These days, some hardware vendors actually want you to confuse the two terms.
The distinction is so important because standards in and of themselves are actually super great. A standard where we agree to use the same terminology to minimize confusion among staffers (such as ITIL) or to stop networking confusion (such as IPv6) avoids wasting time and resources.
But an effective standard needs a reason to exist. What do I mean? Standardization could also be described as constraining or restricting options, so it's a good thing only when there's a clear business objective behind it.
The trouble is, IT isn't terribly good at standardization. In our InformationWeek Standardization Survey, we asked 400 business technology professionals to grade their organizations on how they're doing with standards: Did they enforce rigorous standards when needed but allow more agile behavior when possible? Only 9 percent graded themselves at A, and more than 40 percent gave themselves a C or worse.
We asked the question with that balance of rigor and agility on purpose. Standards without a corresponding and well understood objective can hurt IT's relationships throughout the company. If a developer can't use some time-saving step because the infrastructure team has an operating system or server standard that thwarts it -- without any clear, expressed reason -- will that developer be happy? I don't think so.
Outside IT, employees understand when a company standardizes on PCs, not Macs, for an established cost objective, and because most everyone knows how to use a PC. But end users are skeptical of more granular standards that they see as arbitrary and senseless.
Standardization can be a great tool in cost savings and transitioning however too much standardization can strangle progress and creativity. It's a fine line.
I'm of the opinion that IT shouldn't standardize anything apart from what standards councils already do consider as standards. Apart from that, it takes a lot of strategic smarts to really standardize anything IT. It's too risky for most organizations.
Yes, one would think change would be top priority but at the same time, change in IT is so dynamic and frequent that it becomes a difficult task to keep up with standardization. Especially, if the standards are not documented.
" Change gets in the way of infrastructure managers carrying out the mission of uptime."
This is ironic. Shouldn't change be of utmost importance in the IT industry? It would seem that would be the case in an industry of innovators.
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It was about 10 years ago when a new generation of software-as-a-service (SaaS) alternatives started to gain acceptance and adoption among organizations of all sizes. And it has only been about five years since Amazon Web Services captured the marketplace's attention with Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, which opened the door to a vast array of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings. Now, the third piece of the cloud computing puzzle is beginning to win over organizations seeking to build their own apps: platform-as-a-service (PaaS).
Energy consumption is a primary contributor to global warming. At the end of 2012, 40 percent of energy consumption in the US came from commercial and residential buildings.
Civil libertarians are outraged at the revelation the NSA is reportedly spying on more than one-third of Americans -- obtaining phone records from phone companies, in case it might need them for later use. Edward Snowden, the man who leaked details of that program, also revealed a second effort dubbed “Prism,” which represented a more aggressive grab of email and other communications. (See: Prism Exposes Unwritten Privacy Rules.)
In the past few weeks, Evernote, Twitter, and LinkedIn have implemented an optional security feature: two-step verification. It's time -- perhaps even past due -- for enterprises to consider offering this feature as well.
Big-data and analytics tools enable marketers to understand customers as individuals, identifying unmet needs and addressing each customer as a "segment of one," says John Kennedy, VP corporate marketing, IBM.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
So here we are, the last day of the 2013 US Open Golf Championship at Merion, and Phil Mickelson -- who has been a US Open runner-up five times now but never taken the trophy -- is right up there at the top of the leaderboard.
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