What happened to standards development — where vendors would collaborate to provide a base level of interoperability between products so end users could pick and choose the best products for them? It seems to be a thing of the past, leading to unavoidable lock-in. Let’s look at some recent examples and the issues they present.
One of my biggest bugbears in IT is the implementation of standards between companies, be this in job titles, procedures, iconography, conventions and so on. Now, it’s understandable that not everyone will agree on definitions, and different people have different understandings of ideas and concepts. A good example of these differences comes from defining terms used within ITIL for service management (helpdesk): What constitutes a service request? What constitutes an incident? What constitutes a problem? When does a change request need to be generated?