The premise for adopting standards is to establish a process that is well understood and defined to enable the orderly innovation and adoption of technology within the University. Enterprise standards support the technology vision and principles of the strategic information technology plan of the University. Most importantly, standards should promote migration to enterprise solutions with reduced complexity, expense, and support. The establishment and governance of enterprise standards requires a constant balancing between too much control and not enough control. Standards can be both beneficial and detrimental, depending on the perspective of the user. Standards must provide a sufficient amount of flexibility so that the University¹s business is not constrained, while simultaneously encouraging stewardship of scarce resources.

Today, standards are necessary to promote transparent communications and facilitate the exchange of information across the many systems operating at the University and throughout the state. The University of Kentucky, like most information technology environments, is very heterogeneous, not homogeneous. This means that the environment is made up of hardware, software, and other components that serve a wide range of purposes. These products may not always be standard and often represent a variety of vendors rather than a single vendor. The University is a large and diffuse organization spanning every county in the Commonwealth, and reaching out nationally and globally. Standards are important in providing the ability for all parts of the university to interact and communicate with each other. Standards are essential in ensuring that systems can communicate, which is essential in an increasingly network-centric world. Standards, such as network protocols and interfaces between applications, allow systems on a variety of hardware and operating system platforms to share information and data. Standards will be established, recognizing that in an organization, such as a research university, some flexibility and latitude is required. In some situations, standards will be established for certain categories of activities (e.g. access to enterprise systems that provide administrative services may require a narrowly defined set of products and services, while a desktop device in a laboratory may be more loosely defined.) With enterprise standards established, an orderly and predictable transition from the current environment to future environments can be planned and budgeted. The transition to enterprise standards will occur over time; the intention of establishing standards is not to mandate compliance on the day that the standards are published. Standards offer departments an informed opportunity to plan and budget for a transition, taking into account the current environment and the priorities and business directions for the department.

Standards will be reviewed and updated on a regular and consistent basis. It is critical the enterprise standards be maintained in order to accommodate existing technologies as well as emerging ones. The technology in many areas, such as desktop computing, is evolving rapidly and the standards in these areas will need to be updated frequently as the technology changes. The standards in other areas, such as network protocols, may change more slowly but still need to be reviewed and evaluated regularly. There is a policy and procedures method being developed to support the process of reviewing and updating the standards (Appendix A - Updating the University IT Enterprise Standards and Products). This process will allow a department to present a business case when there is a need to consider adding a new product or review an exception to the standards.

The procurement of hardware, software and computing services is a vital process for the successful implementation of technology initiatives. There must be a direct relationship between standards and products to the price contracts in place that support the purchasing process. Standards or products on the list will have active price contracts available so that departments can easily buy the products and services necessary for operations. The list will be dynamic which may necessitate changes in the way contracts are awarded and modified. The standards list and price contracts must be synchronized for the new process to work effectively. Review and update cycles to the list will be established that allow for changes and modifications to occur to price contracts. The following are examples that need to be considered for purchasing:

• review the cost benefits whether to lease or purchase the product; and
• purchase a maintenance agreement on a product at time of acquisition; purchasing upgrades to a product which are normally part of a maintenance agreement are more expensive.