Daily Network Monitor

Mr. James Governer is an Industry Analyst with RedMonk.
has a really good blog. And I came across an interesting topic; the title of this posting is the same as his.

“… it seems to me the language of best practices is often utterly bankrupt. A best practice, to my mind, must be based on direct practitioner experience. Unfortunately in our field it can mean almost anything. In the web services community, for example, “best practice” is often used as shorthand for implementation of a standard. The disease of calling arbitrary processes or implementations best practices holds the industry back, again and again.”

“…shouldnt we be looking for “best infrastructure” though, rather than best practices? After all, the best infrastructure has already proven itself in production, while best practices on the other hand have often not proven themselves anywhere other than on a technical document.”

“What companies would benefit most from “best infrastructure” thinking? Best in class service providers. EBay, Amazon, Google, Fedex and so on. ….Who would suffer in a best infrastructure world? Likely IBM for one. IBM Global Services and Business Consulting make tens of billions of dollars selling best practices. Even SAP, which sells best practices instantiated in code, is still selling best practices, rather than the best solution to the job. … I am talking about the difference between specification and implementation.”

See the rest of James’ article http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/archives/002264.html“>here.