Technology Stack Standardisation

Every additional technology in an estate carries a recurring cost: expertise to run it, a security and patching path, monitoring integration, upgrade work, and an engineer who cannot move between teams without relearning.

That cost is real and is rarely counted when the choice is made, because it falls on a different budget and a later year.

Standardisation reduces it, and the naive version — a mandated list — fails predictably: teams with a genuine need route around it, the standard ages because nobody may revisit it, and enforcement consumes goodwill that is needed elsewhere.

The paved road formulation is what works. Centralise the default, not the mandate: a supported path that is genuinely easier — managed, with platform-owned libraries, standard observability, documented patterns — plus an exception process where a team documents the requirement and accepts the operational ownership that comes with leaving the road.

Two signals to monitor: a rising exception rate means the road is wrong, not that teams are non-compliant; and shadow technology appearing outside the process means the exception path is too slow.

And standards need a lifecycle — adopted, in review, deprecated, retired — with dates, or the estate accumulates permanently and nothing is ever removed.