Technology Standards
Guidance that teams follow because it helps, not because it is mandated.
6 to work through
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intermediate Multiple choice
A platform company wants engineering standards without slowing autonomous teams. Where should standards be mandatory, and where should they be defaults?
2 min answer -
intermediate
How do you set a technology standard that teams follow without resenting?
2 min answer -
advanced
An organisation has grown from 200 to 2,000 engineers and each team chose its own queue, cache and database. What criteria decide which technologies become paved-road defaults, which are tolerated, and which are retired — and how is the migration funded?
3 min answer -
advanced
On 9 December 2021 a remote code execution flaw in Apache Log4j 2 (CVE-2021-44228, CVSS 10.0) was disclosed. Organisations that had standardised on one logging library across hundreds of services found the following week expensive in a specific way. What failed, which design decision made it possible, and what is the general lesson about standards?
3 min answer -
advanced
Salesforce's multi-tenant design - described in its 2009 SIGMOD paper - stores customer-specific structures as metadata over shared tables rather than giving each tenant its own schema. What does that platform-wide constraint buy the vendor and what does it charge its customers?
3 min answer -
advanced
Where should an organisation impose technology standards and where should teams choose freely? What principle draws the line?
2 min answer
5 terms in this topic
Exception Register
A record of every deviation from a standard, with approver, rationale and review date - which makes violations deliberate rather than silent and tell…
practiceGoverned Exception
A deliberate, scoped, time-limited departure from a standard, recorded with an owner - which is always better than the ungoverned workaround it prevents.
conceptStandardisation Blast Radius
The property that a technology standard concentrates exposure as well as capability - one flaw in the standardised component applies to the whole est…
practiceStandards Lifecycle
Managing technology standards through explicit states with review dates, so the standard set reflects current reality rather than past decisions.
practiceTechnology Standards
Constraining technology variety to reduce operational cost — with a waiver path, or the standard is broken quietly rather than formally.
Neighbouring topics
Enterprise Architecture
General material on architecture at portfolio and estate scale.
EA Domains
Business, application, data and technology architecture as viewpoints.
Application Architecture
The application estate as a designed portfolio rather than an accumulation.
Technology Architecture
Platforms, runtimes and infrastructure standards across the estate.
Capability Maps in EA
The stable frame for hanging investment, ownership and health off.
Application Portfolio Management
Inventory, ownership, cost and health for every application.
Application Rationalisation
Retire, consolidate, replatform — and why retirement is under-applied.
Technology Radar
Adopt, trial, assess and hold — with movement, dates and owners.
Reference Architectures
Pre-approved templates for recurring solution shapes.
Architecture Governance
Preventive, automated controls rather than review meetings.
Architecture Review Boards
Thresholds, early engagement and a real route to accept deviation.
Enterprise Integration
Estate-wide integration strategy, standards and shared infrastructure.
TOGAF
The ADM as a checklist, tailored rather than followed literally.
EA Frameworks
Zachman, FEAF and others — vocabulary rather than method.
Architecture Roadmaps
Sequencing change across an estate with dependencies and funding.
Paved Roads
Making the supported path the easiest path, with a way to leave it.
Platform Teams
Reducing other teams' cognitive load, measured by adoption.
InnerSource
Open-source collaboration practices applied inside an organisation.
EA Metrics
Measuring whether architecture work changed anything.