THERE ARE TOO MANY STANDARDS, AND THERE ARE TOO FEW

Complaints are often heard that there are too many standards, and also that there are too few standards. This paper asks how many standards there ought to be, discusses the two viewpoints, and concludes that both of these apparently contradictory statements are true. However, while the fact that there are too few standards is self-evident, establishing that there are too many is more difficult: the excessive number are concealed, and not to be found in important quantities in the areas where the complaint is most common. The conclusion is drawn that IT standardization has not been serving the IT community as well as it should, and that the solution to the problem is obvious: we must have fewer standards, and we must also have more.