Remember this famous phrase from Act V. Scene IV of “The Tragedy of K. Richard Jr III, IT Manager” by William S.? If you don’t find this publication in the bookstores, you have a good chance to witness a similar scene in many of IT centres. Why? Simply because the IT industry has frequently struggled to proactively provide adequate standards in a timely fashion. I’ll get back to this statement but first let’s tackle a few preconceived ideas around IT standards straight away:

1) Standards are the IT panacea – NOT! Standards are necessary but not sufficient conditions to allow IT solutions to fully address user requirements.

2) Proprietary solutions are necessarily bad elements – NOT! There are many IT innovations and popular architectures that have come through as proprietary developments. We should not mix up the proprietary nature of a product or architecture and the access or use of such elements.

3) Standards are overhead – NOT! Industry standards are in fact the signs of a mature and stable market. Well designed standards enable the kind of business and/or technical flexibility that many proprietary solutions do not allow to select or recycle IT resource and assets. Standards should also be considered as development tools that help reducing complexity and improve development and deployment cycles.

In reality wherever you come from there are already lots of standards - national and international - that govern many aspects of your life. Roads, schools, electricity, water, taxes, telecommunications, manufacturing… all these very different domains and many others are ruled by very large standards repositories, and it is often a specialist’s job to understand and leverage their contents. Just take a look at the Wikipedia summary for standards - it includes an impressive long list of international references. Those of you that are also frequent world travellers like me would know the pain of carrying bags full of adaptors and power supplies of all sorts to make sure that your equipment can work at your destination when of course it is compatible with the local infrastructure. Fortunately, such problem occurs very rarely at a national level. Imagine what would happen if you had to carry your adaptors’ bag around when going into the office to power your computer or any other equipment? In addition of being ridiculous, it would be hugely disruptive and constraining unnecessarily the mobility of people and goods. You might be tempted to say the same thing about international standard differences, but no one can deny a country the right to decide what standards are best for its development. This is where de-facto standards help sometimes to cross geo-political boarders.
Well guess what? The IT Industry has been and still is very familiar with creating “islands of compatibility” inside and outside data centres, IT Management being a typical example. For many years such vendor tactics have forced users to not put in place true global IT management strategy, missing opportunities to lower IT production costs on all IT layers,
from storage to business applications. Obviously driven by market leadership motives, such silo’d solutions have condemned storage users to mismanage their storage infrastructure and they have hidden opportunities to efficiently
consolidate and rationalize assets and resource utilization. When standards have been introduced to avoid or fix such issues the focus of the IT industry has moved on to start addressing real business issues rather than attempting to
bridge what was not designed to be so. Almost fatefully, many (but not all) standards have been built in reaction to an industry issue rather than as a prepared coordinated effort to provide a good enough technology basis for IT users.

Take a look at the SNIA Storage Management Initiative, besides its technical value it has also notably re-shaped the industry approach for interfacing management tools with storage network resources, seeking more openly the interoperability Grail that many users hope to get one day. But standards cannot directly address business practises
so we can only wish that such storage industry developments had started earlier instead of leaving storage users going through the battlefield of proprietary APIs. The IT industry at large has had many similar examples (software,
network, servers…) and it is therefore not impossible to foresee similar trends in other IT market segments. But planning for standards take time, energy, resource and… willingness! Sometimes this equation is unfortunately too difficult to resolve in a short period of time. 

Whilst I agree that standard documents are not the best literature for the long winter evenings, if you explore INCITS, ISO, IETF, IEEE or T11 you will find tons of impressive ingenuity. Not all standards are good standards though and some of them never get implemented nor adopted. A well adopted standard is either a well-known standard that has been
successfully marketed and possibly about to become de-facto standard (e.g. 802.11 – WiFi or T10 - SCSI) or an “invisible” standard that is extensively used without being broadly recognized (e.g. ISO 9654:2004). Generally adopted and/or large
commercial successes, so called de-facto standards are more often the results of conquering go-to-market campaigns rather than the results of genuine innovations addressing accurately user requirements. Some of them do become
published industry standards but more often nowadays they are released as easily accessible IP such as open source software. De-facto standards sometimes can achieve more than technical standards as they can help to cross business
and political boundaries with very few participants to drive them when it takes much more efforts to get consensus from larger industry constituencies for published standards. The perceived down-side is the extended leadership de-facto standards might give to their originators.

This is why it is interesting and encouraging to see a new type of industry consortiums / standards development organizations attempting to address the need for IT standards in a different way. OASIS, GGF, SNIA or EGA - to only name a few – are trying to proactively develop initiatives with many different parties such as technical experts, end-users, education specialists, etc. in order to not only produce technical standards (directly or through an official ratification channel) but also to define a path-to-market for standards that includes technical, educational and promotional components for all IT professionals. The proactive-ness of these groups will determine if whether or not such approach can be successful in the long term as it clearly requires an extended commitment from all participants. An encouraging sign of standards bodies’ activity is the number of joint initiatives, alliances or even merger (see GGF/EGA merger announcement) demonstrating a desire to streamline standardization efforts across IT layers.         

Overall, in the last 5 years I have seen the development of IT standards becoming a much more business-aware activity than it used to be. It is a fact that there are still many more efforts to make in order to reduce what I would call the business-lag for standards. The business values of standards are however undeniable and I would strongly encourage
storage & IT users and IT professionals to extend their collaboration to forge a complementary standards development process.

Comments RSS