On Standards
When an individual, group or pulls the "It's a Standard" card, what's your reaction? Do you take it for face value or do you question the "standard" and how it achieved this status?
I often find that these "standards" are defined without a clear path. Many are "de-facto standards" that have "always been that way" and others an individual or group labeled as a standard because it was confortable.
For example, I had a customer's application delivery teams select the infrastructure and management platform for a desktop virtualization solution while dismissing the organizations investment, expertise and success with technologies that run > 90% of enterprise application workloads. All based on their perceived comfort from the brand name of the vendor.
I'm of the opinion that organizations should adopt a set of baseline decision criteria that are used for the purpose and process of selecting and gaining consensus on architecture standards. This baseline should represent the minimum set of decision criteria needed, and this baseline can be used as the basis of a business case analysis.
When the someone or some group (e.g., domain team, ad hoc working group, or other body/individual) of a proposed standard applies these criteria, they can then prioritize the relative importance of each criterion by assigning weights as applicable given the technical domain for which these criteria are being considered.
Prioritizing, weighting, and applying these decision criteria ensures the same level of analysis in considering standards that a project and product manager exercises when developing a project proposal for a potential investment.