Scott Herrmann, VP of Information Systems & Technology at Sheakley

Do you see any trade-off between innovation and standardization? Can you give me an example? 

“I think you have to have elements of both innovation and standardization to be cost effective and efficient. It’s true that the younger guys among engineers and IT developers love to create new stuff and it’s just not as cool to have to go fix old stuff. But I think of innovation as taking five steps forward and one step back. When we have a goal or objective to design a new thing, we work to resolve the technical issues and create a viable solution, and once we are about eighty percent there, I want to step back and figure out how we will make it scalable for the company, because without standards, it’s only going to work for one thing.

As an example, we are planning to completely rewrite one of our ERP applications and we are moving to a micro-service architecture, which is a new way of doing things for us. To do this we must write one big application to ensure that many smaller apps will all be able to talk with each other and this will definitely require some standardization. So to meet this new challenge, we will take a few steps forward innovating, and then we will step back to assess where we need a few standards to make it more broadly acceptable.”