Conform or co-exist?

This post suggesting a need for extreme standardisation needs to be discussed within industry. The idea of having extreme standardisation is extremely appealing but highly impractical. Pulls and counter-pulls within industry will make sure that there are always competing standards.

Vendors dont agree on Who decides on standardisation. There are multiple competing bodies even in standard setting space. Who decides what are the categories for standards? Should everything be in standard. That would imply commoditisation. What will vendors bring in as differentiation? There are no easy answers. If we ignore these questions then we will end up with surfeit of standards on top of existing mess.

As they said in vedic period "pinde pinde matirbhinna". Translated in English it means, every soul has different thinking. Implied in that is the notion that no thinking is superior or inferior, so who is to say which one should become standard? Each different specification mechanism or execution methodology is mostly in response to something desired by user community. So in some sense they represent user's aspirations (and vendor's motivations). How can these different motivations and aspirations be reconciled?

So what is the way out? Well there are ways of tackling these tricky questions.

For example instead of relying on extreme standardisation, industry bodies can work on interoperability standards. To do that, first thing as an industry we must agree on means to define categorisation and 'Domains of discourse'. We can then go on to develop interoperability standards for these various domains (intra domain as well as inter domain). Within IT there are various domains of discourse, for example if you consider IT change management category, the domains could be business strategy, IT strategy, portfolio planning, requirement & scoping, design & build, verification & validation, roll out & operational management, systems retirement etc. Similarly for different categorisation there will be different domains of discourse. Each of these domains will have many competing specification mechanisms and execution methodologies. What we need is means to interoperate between these specifications and methodologies for a domain of discourse and across domain of discourse.

With such interoperability standards in place the deliverable from one specification mechanism can be used to drive deliverables which use another specification mechanism. Similarly activities from one methodology can be used to trigger activities of other methodology. If we achieve this, as an industry, it will be a great leap forward. (MOF - meta object facility by OMG, is close enough example of an interoperability standard).

Or if we are lucky a dominant de facto standard may evolve in every domains of discourse. And if it is far superior to any competing ones, as had happened in case of RDBMS and SQL, then it can become a de jure standard.

So however appealing the idea of compliance to well defined standards, I am afraid we have to learn to manage myriad of different standards and help them co-exist.