Standards: a good thing when they're good standards ?

You probably have witnessed the corporate dynamics around introducing standards already. It's a typical architecture instrument. Here's the basic forces in the forcefield:
- Standards are good for cost control and clarity. Most CxO's approve, support and enforce them.
- Enforced standards limit team level freedom and therefore narrow the solution space to a given project challenge. Sometimes this is good since it forces people to see the big picture instead of this years' personal objectives when designing a solution. In this case, the solution space is not really much narrower, since a perfectly fine solution to the project challenge remains available that also meets the big picture constraints (despite all the whining about .NET being more productive and fun than Java EE). However there are cases in which the solution space is severely narrowed, which forces the team to either play the game and try to get away with non-standard, or solving the given project challenge badly. Since noone, and especially an architect, likes spending his life delivering bad solutions, most teams will play the game.

This is where this story gets interesting for enterprise architects. This will turn out to be a personal attitude thing again, but the important point is this: enterprise architects need the ability to recognize business innovation that requires non-standard technology.

A lot of professionals get by on meeting reflexes as a substitute for thinking. These guys are lost on my point above: whenever someone suggest to use something non-standard, they will retaliate and a loose-loose power struggle to enforce the standard vs. solve the project challenge is on. Innovation is often seen as a weird idea at first. This was true for, chronologically, hot air balloons, steam trains, airplanes denser than air, cheap hotels low on staff, B2B fully automated services, and boeings flying into buildings (probably a lot of Jihadis would have found this weird too, I wasn't there when Osama proposed it at first, but thanks to Jens for making me see this was actually terroristic innovation - after this post we will both be on Echelons black list and get the rubber glove treatment on our next entry into the US :-)). None of this would have happened if these organisations or individuals would have respected their standards.

Now, what does it take to be enterprise architect material and recognize business innovation when you see it:
- How does the projects business challenge differ from the generic process that standards were based on. This requires a view on what makes a business case, what is business innovation, what the standard technology can reasonably support, why this technology was chosen as a standard etc.
- But most importantly: an open mind for weird ideas. Listening, using your knowledge to think and judge efficiently, taking a commitment to solving the project challenge together, and the persuasion power to either enforce the standard when it doesn't narrow the solution space, or to convince CxO's to let go of standards for really intrapreneuring projects.

I've had quite a few windmill fights over these issues in the past 13 years. Not a very abundant skill in corporations ?