October 22, 2010 from The Enterprise System Spectator – “…The term best practices has at least two major and totally different definitions, and second, in many areas of business, there is not generally agreement on what are the best practices…”
180 View – This is good article that reflects our philosophy. The major vendors and consulting firms always pitch best practice to their prospects and clients and that they are the source for best practice. I often see proposals that are based on the assumption that best practices will be applied to an implementation. But some processes are strategic in nature and best practices may not apply. In other cases, the costs to implement best practice outweigh any benefits.
Great find. I’ll take it a step further: in smaller owner-managed companies and startups, you’ll frequently find non-standard business practices that are innovations, that give the company a competitive edge, and that in fact may become so-called best practices a few years down the road – but right now, a doctrinaire “best practices” approach would squash them.
Example: think Facebook a few years ago – how many best practices did they fail to follow early on? Just about all of them.