Standards for excellence - are you seeing trees or forests?

April 15, 2021

Let’s face it—sometimes it is hard to see the forest for the trees. Some may feel this way when they are reviewing IT standards. It might feel a bit confusing, like being lost in the forest.

That feeling is a clear sign that it is time to zoom out and see the big picture. Once you understand the standards as a whole, you can better understand how they apply to your work. 

The context for IT standards is not technology but rather service to the community. That is why our IT Architecture Standards focus on improving operational excellence in service delivery through consistent, repeatable, secure, and reliable approaches.

The Yale community is benefitting from the development and adoption of ITS standards. They have improved accessibility to websites, increased the security and performance of applications for getting work done, and ensured that the flow of quality data goes to the right people at the optimal time. Beyond these improvements, we continue to develop new standards to address Yale’s needs.

Developing a standards-based mindset is vital to our ability to achieve operational excellence—so much so that our project gating process requires compliance to the ITS standards. During gating, projects must demonstrate compliance to these standards when seeking IT solution architecture approval from the Technology Architecture Committee.

Take a moment to review the approved IT Architecture Standards and then use them in your own work. You will find that they are not as hard to wrap your mind around as the earlier metaphor implied. You will also find that they will streamline your efforts over time. Written by ITS service teams, our standards use plain language specific to Yale’s IT practices. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to the service team that developed a specific standard or the Enterprise Architecture Team for support.

Service Quality