Where do I start with an IT standards library?

February 7, 2008 10:29 AM

Please help me figure out a starting point for research and planning. I need to take the lead on making a standards library or process library at work (a medium-sized IT department), and while I have some ideas, I really don't know where to start, or what resources to use as a planning guide and sanity check.

While I know that we'll use our extant document management tools and processes to store, organize and search the library, what I really need to know is if there are any non-trade-organization-firewalled (i.e. non-fee-based, public) resources on how to start thinking about and designing a standards library.

My closest relevant experience is in policy writing, both from the standpoint of computer security and from the standpoint of organizational policy/administration, and while some of that experience is professional or volunteer experience, I really don't have formal training.

What I really want to know is whether there are publicly accessible primers and resource libraries about these sorts of topics, or whether I should be pushing managers at work to send me to or help me pay for formal training in these fields.

posted by kalessin to technology (5 comments total)

What is the objective of building the standards library? Is a lack of standardization causing specific problems you are charged to solve? Is it mandated by regulation? If not it seems like a good first step would be to establish some goals to try to accomplish through the creation and ongoing use and maintenance of the library. Even if the only real objective is to check it off on some executive's checklist it's important to at least internally recognize that.
posted by XMLicious at 11:45 AM on February 7, 2008

Following on to XMLicious, it's gonna be hard if the only objective is:

1. Standards and process library
2. ???
3. Kwalitee!

There should be a list of problems to be solved by standards and process, so a good place to start would be to compile this list and rank the issues in terms of importance and by the predicted improvements in solving them. From this list you can research and apply techniques, standards and process improvements and adjust the list based on complexity and time-to-solve. This should give you a starting point at which you can start assigning projects to people in terms of the emerging framework. Source control, testing procedures, workflows, etc. can all be either imposed or your can bring everyone on board with "this is the way I'd like to do things" meetings. Ultimately it's going to be up to you to talk to people and make your own decisions about what is a problem and what isn't. Those are the goals that should be satisfied with standards and process improvements.
posted by rhizome at 12:15 PM on February 7, 2008

The objective of having the library is to have a baseline against which we can compare proposed business logic or technology process changes.

The library is being developed in parallel with a couple of guidance/oversight committees as well as overall change management processes, and the planning horizon is 3 - 5 years.

But I certainly don't know if that's enough, and I'm pretty sure that most of the folks who are involved in establishing the associated committees and change management processes right now are convinced that it will be enough, but all of this associated set of work is deemed needful by upper level IT executives, champions, sponsors, etc., so it looks like we'll all get a fair shake at trying to make it work.

The scope has already been narrowed, and current focus is on delivering processes/standards docs about a particular kind of overall operation we do pretty often. I assume the change management process apparatus will also focus on that subset of our specialty skills as well, initially.

Thank you for your suggestions so far.
posted by kalessin at 2:32 PM on February 7, 2008

The objective of having the library is to have a baseline against which we can compare proposed business logic or technology process changes.

Ah, so you're trying to document existing processes rather than proscribe new ones? In that case I think this qualifies as a ‘knowledge management’ initiative, which is probably a keyword you want to add to your searches. I'm only peripherally familiar with that, being more involved in the content management layer / sphere of things, but I can tell you that there are entire magazines devoted to KM and definitely lots of books and courses available.

Hope that's new information to you.
posted by XMLicious at 5:33 PM on February 8, 2008

Another thing I thought I'd mention - I haven't done this specific sort of thing myself, but when I first read your post I was thinking that a wiki seems like an excellent way to do it, or at least to get things started, if you need to collect information about the way existing processes are working.

You could set the wiki up, give everyone a pitch about trying to jot down the steps for things as they try to go through them, and hopefully within a little while you'd have a good basis that you'd just have to formalize and touch up to make the real documentation. It could even work in tandem - you could leave the wiki up where it would accumulate more notes and caveats and things and the committee or person charged with reviewing the process documentation could do a diff on the wiki to see what's been added since the last time the formal document was reviewed.
posted by XMLicious at 6:17 PM on February 8, 2008