Standards are great, but best practices make everything better!
When I travel, I've got standards set for such things as hotels where I get booked. They must be in a safe area, clean and reasonably close to the client site. My flights must be prebooked -- never standby -- on a major carrier and, unfortunately, coach class. My rental car must be from a major provider, not be a subcompact and have power seats - so I can see over the steering wheel and reach the pedals.
These are my basic required standards for business travel, however, best practices take me a step further. For example, my hotel should have a restaurant on-site and rooms should open only into a secured corridor, not the outdoors. I also refuse to stay in a room if the patio or suite doors cannot be secured. Lastly, there should be a coffee maker in my room so I don't have to forage bleary-eyed for caffeine in the morning.
My best practice for air travel is to fly my favored carrier whenever possible. This helps me obtain preferred seating, upgrades and other perks that increase the quality of my experience. If I get a free upgrade to first class, I may get a meal in flight and can skip the drive-thru garbage on the way to the client's office. As a matter of fact, I recently qualified for a six month free membership to an "executive traveler" club. I definitely get more work done in one of their quiet rooms than I do fighting the masses at my gate.
Driving in strange vehicles in unfamiliar cities can be a daunting experience, so I make it a practice to get rentals with a Global Positioning System (GPS). Hertz® refers to these as their Never Lost® system. I call it the "never lost for long" system! I pay a bit more for the GPS, but with my navigational skills, I more than make up for it with more billable hours at the client site as opposed to driving aimlessly in circles around strange cities. OK, lost and freaked out about it! Stress is never good, and the possibility of being late for a meeting and hopelessly lost causes lots of stress in my book!
While the basic standards for business travel are fairly easily met, it can be difficult to justify the added expense needed to push the experience up a notch to "best practice" levels. However, with a little extra effort and expense, the overall success of the trip is significantly enhanced and typically ends up being less expensive (due to vendor-provided perks such as free meals, internet access, upgrades and the like).
When you think about information technology and it asset management, it is easy to see how standards are important. Most of us are familiar with any number of established standards-setting organizations, such as the Project Management Institute (PMI), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO®) and The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE®). Standards are an essential element to manufacturing equipment that will play nice with other equipment, such as wireless modems, external drives, printers and more. Standards are imperative for hardware and software developers as well. It wouldn't make sense to write software that didn't work on the majority of PCs in use, now would it?
Before ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) was invented by computer pioneer Bob Bemer, there were over 60 ways to represent characters in computers! He referred to those days as a "real Tower of Babel!"
When you get past the basic standards, such as taking "I must be in an airplane with wings" to a higher level ("I must be on an airplane with a jet engine and it must have met rigorous safety standards") you simply get a higher-quality solution. This is what is referred to as best practices.
Now some might argue that standards could be so rigorous they surpass best practices, but in my experience just the opposite is true. I've seen a definition of standards as "something set up and established by authority as a rule for the measure of quantity, weight, extent, value, or quality" and "an acknowledged basis for comparing or measuring something." Hum. Practice is "to perform or work at repeatedly so as to become proficient," so best practices could be described as a process for optimal tactics and strategies. Neither standards nor best practices can guarantee success in every situation; rather, they describe those tactics and strategies used in successful companies.
The Hackett Group, a business advisory firm, studied best practices at 200 organizations and recently reported that "world-class" organizations spend 18 percent less than the average company on IT. On top of that impressive figure, those organizations do so with 36 percent fewer workers. Those companies deliver 91 percent of all projects on time, on budget and with the intended results and benefits. Median companies, reportedly, meet these criteria only 68 percent of the time. Ouch!
So when it comes to the metrics for justifying best practices -- even if they are just suggestions -- there seems to be good reason to push the envelope from standards that must be met to practices that are strongly recommended. But how does one know what is a "best practice"? Looking more closely at The Hackett Group findings, one will discover that world-class organizations use best practices to achieve simplification and standardization and they develop higher levels of process discipline to improve IT's overall alignment with business objectives. When savings are achieved, some of that money is reinvested into technology that adds business value and potentially contributes to the company's bottom line.
One of the other strategies that world-class organizations use to "do more with less" is to manage IT vendors more strategically than average businesses do. Typically they will use 5 percent fewer hardware vendors, 29 percent less contractor services and 65 percent fewer software suppliers. By managing vendors more advantageously, world-class organizations typically can support the business with about 28 IT staffers per thousand end users as opposed to average companies who typically need 44 IT staffers for the same quantity of users. Please, folks, let's not run out and cut IT headcounts - let's position ourselves for growth by implementing best practices, raising the maturity level of our processes and managing vendors more effectively through strong negotiations and tight service level agreements (SLAs).
Focusing on standardization and service delivery models and ensuring alignment with overall business strategies are good first steps to moving up on the proverbial food chain of success. Remember the good ole "KISS" rule: Keep it simple, sister! OK, I paraphrased! Tight project management processes -- preferably standardized and formal -- company wide is another key to the probability of more project successes. Moreover, The Hackett Group study found that the best companies, those that adhere to a common project management methodology 90 percent of the time, can achieve optimal results. Six Sigma and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) are both good examples of process management practices that are well developed and can be deployed company wide -- most notably for IT projects.
Experts agree that the critical success factors for successful Information Systems Implementations contain the following key elements: Clearly define goals, scope and purpose of the project Ensure top management support and a skilled, respected project leader Recruit, hire or assign appropriate personnel for the team Appropriately leverage outside resources and vendors Use industry standard technology - match it to needs properly - abide by standards Properly "sell" the project to stakeholders Communicate effectively and often with stakeholders Pilot the program competently Train and support users Expeditiously troubleshoot deviations from the plan
I would add to this list: learn from your mistakes and endeavor not to repeat them, and document, document, document! People implement best practices, tools cannot. Try to match the application of best practices to individual job functions and illustrate the value of using those practices. Strive for continuous improvements by holding "lessons learned" meetings at project completion and then changing a process to reflect those improvements.
If your organization doesn't currently have a set of established best practices for a particular component of your IT operations, consider leveraging those set by organizations such as the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITSSM), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) or any number of other organizations. In essence, look for practices that have consistently demonstrated a significant improvement to the bottom line.
Best practices can help us all rest comfortably in the knowledge that we are doing our jobs efficiently; ensure that we never find ourselves lost in the process quagmire and ensure that we are quickly alerted to deviations that need immediate attention.
Hum ... resting comfortably ... never lost ...alert. A good bed, car and caffeine close at hand! Life is good for a road warrior who follows best practices!
About the author: Donna Johnson Edwards is the Director of Consulting for Tenax, Inc. Established in the U.S. in 2002, Tenax provides IT compliance certifications, training and targeted consulting services. For further information on Software Asset Management please visit the Tenax Corporation website at www.tenaxcorporation.com.