10 Laws of Information Technology

1.       Never lose data

2.       Centralize when you can, distribute when you have to

3.       Standardize when you can, customize when you have to

4.       Simple is better than complex

5.       Spend as little as possible to solve problem or achieve a goal

6.       100% utilization of IT assets always yield the lowest cost

7.       Always have a “plan B”

8.       If it CAN break, it WILL break

9.       Volume Changes Everything

10.   Do Not Be Married To Your Technology

How does a business owner decide when to standardize their IT infrastructure or when to customize it?  My third law of IT calls for standardization first and customization second.

Why?

Think about what it means to standardize something.  You have the same thing that is produced over and over again.  This gives you all kinds of benefits:

1.       A standard allows better collaboration and innovation.  Imagine if you had a different electrical voltage in your house with different plugs.  You’d spend all your time keeping up with and finding various connectors, appliances couldn’t move from room to room, etc.  One functioning, standard platform allows you to focus on higher-order things.

2.       The manufacturing costs of standard products are lower.  Mass production allows you to benefit from lower prices.

3.       Standards cost less to maintain.  If I have three different design programs, then I have to buy and pay maintenance on three products.  We also then must train IT people and Staff in three different tools.  We could have 3x the problems coming into the helpdesk.  And what about staff mobility?  With standards, we can move staff from project to project and they don’t have to learn a new tool.  Will your business have higher profits by having 3 tools vs. having one tool?  If the answer is “no”, then you should decommission 2 of your products.

4.       Commercial software is a standard vs. writing your own custom application.  Would you rather pay Microsoft a small fee each year to develop and maintain a spreadsheet program or would you rather hire a bunch of programmers to write your own spreadsheet program?  You standardize on a commercial application because it frees up tremendous resources to focus on your core business.  You will have higher profits if you can run your business on standard, commercial products.

5.       As a software engineer, I liked to write code.  As a business leader, I don’t like to hire people to write code.  Code is very customized and very costly to maintain.  You should only be writing code if your business requires something that does not exist in any form on this planet.  I don’t even like Open Source unless another business has adopted it and selling it as a commercial product.  Open Source may give you a head start in writing code, but you still need programmers to maintain it.  I don’t like to run my business on a bunch of volunteers.  If you maintain your own open source library, you have a very customized environment.

6.       Standard interfaces allow for a variety of technologies to “talk” to one another.  Remember the days when we were arguing over LAN networking protocols?  Token Ring, Ethernet, Apple Talk, SNA, etc.  If I had a device on an SNA network, it was difficult to talk to a device on an Ethernet network without a lot of translation.  Life is so much simpler now that we’re standardized on Ethernet/IP.

When do you “have to” customize?

1.       You have an invention or an idea that gives your business a competitive advantage.  Customized Ipods have won out over standard mp3 players.  You write an application and it becomes your “secret sauce” in delivering your products and services.

2.       You have standard applications but need one to talk to another to implement a specialized workflow or automation that only your company has.  I call this “glue code” since you are gluing together two different commercial products.

3.       The cost of having a customized environment earns more revenue/profit than a standard one.  Maybe it does make sense for you to have three different design programs because you are able to target different markets that use those products.  Maybe European customers prefer one tool while North American customers prefer another tool.  You become experts in all of them to capture this market opportunity.

4.       Constantly re-evaluate your customizations.  What made sense to customize in one year, may not make sense to customize in the future.  Business, markets, and technology are constantly changing.  If there is a new product on the market that does 80-90% of what your customized application will do, it might make sense to adopt the standard product.  Again, standardize when you can, customize only when you have to.