Pensieri di un lunatico minore

The sea of standards and frameworks

In my “day job,” I spent most of my time working in the acronym-saturated world of standards and frameworks. Things like CobiT, ITIL, HIPAA, ITU-T, FIPS, ISO 17799/27001, not to mention all the NIST work that governs and is referenced by FISMA and OMB. It’s a vertiable sea of acronyms and interlocking recommendations and standards. The one area, however, that is totally lacking in recommendations and frameworks is the actual operational world: NOC and SOC. Nothing of any value, unless you consider ITU-T of value, which I don’t.

This makes it really hard when customers want “best practices,” but the best practices aren’t something that is documented in some commonly accepted form, but instead live in people’s heads as things they’ve learned over the years in operations. What’s the best way to manage shift rotation? How should you organize people in a room? What’s the best way to handle escalation issues? All of these are things that are a common need across organizations, but I’m unaware of any standard way to handle them, or even a framework for “thinking about them.”

Then again, this stuff is all very “squishy” and often is as much HR as it is technology. People are much harder to specify on paper.