Adopting Standards

Adopting standards support the creation of your organization's information technology architecture. Therefore, it is important to establish a process for identifying standards to be adopted. With a process in place, anyone in the organization will be able to recommend a standard be adopted. Once a standard has been recommended for adoption, the IT department should conduct a preliminary review of the standard to determine if it conforms to the IT architecture strategy and business needs of the organization. Additional consideration should be given to determine the degree of scalability, extensibility, portability and interoperability that the standard will afford to the organization. After the preliminary evaluation has been conducted, IT should form a task team to participate in the evaluation and adoption of the standard. This may require the participants to seek the advice of others in the organization and bring the comments to the task team for discussion. Once the task team has reached consensus on adopting the standard, it is important to provide notification to the organization of the adoption and the perceived benefit it will bring.

There are three basic criteria that should be investigated when you consider whether to adopt a standard. The three criteria of maturity,adoption and endurance are what you should use to determine the appropriate standards for your organization to adopt or impement. You don't want to implement a draft standard as they are subject to change so you will want to go with a published version. If you want to be "first" to implement a standard, wait until the draft is almost final. Don't go with an alpha version. Look at who has adopted the standard. A standard that is widely adopted will endure. Endurance is the third characteristic to look at. Make sure the standard and the organization that developed the standard have been around for a while.

To see what standards AIIM is working on, visit http://www.aiim.org/standards. We are always looking for new standards projects. If you have an idea, send me an email at bfanning@aiim.org.