We offer a self-service, cloud-based solution that should cover 90% of the diagramming needs of most SMBs. However, many of our SMB customers feel that their edge case is so strong that they cannot use our product unless we customize it just for them.

In reality, most of these SMBs should not (and cannot) pay us for custom development work. Do you have any suggestions for how we can reframe the conversation around how SMBs should adapt their needs to existing tools, rather than the other way around?

http://everythingsysadmin.com/

For engineering in electronics, aviatics etc. this means a set of publications containing the aggregated consensus.

I said that this is not available for IT, you contradicted, but then you proved my point.

Best practices are not yet gathered as a single, definitive source. This is true in all industries. Large vendors and standards bodies tend to produce these over time. In the 1990s, Microsoft produced a great number of these for IT, many of which have now been passed down as legend and sadly, only partially understood so they have skewed over time. (See my article “1998 Calling…”)

Today the biggest collections of best practices are communities like SpiceWorks or MangoLassi where IT experts regularly discuss practices and vet them to ensure that they are updated, realistic and broadly considered. The IT industry desperately needs more oversight as the university system, which produces best practices for most industries, has failed so dramatically that utilizing it itself could be considered not to be a best practice.

One of the goals of this publication is to often public accumulated knowledge after it has been heavily vetted in such communities.

Thank you!

Industry best practices are not hidden. The issues that I see, and lament about, are not ones that are hidden. Practices are security are never hidden, security by obscurity is neither a best practice nor secure. But high availability, risk analysis, good practices…. these are all broadly available. Many communities, for example, discuss these and publish them (and vet them) daily. There is much written on best practices and most practices are pretty well established and agreed upon. The biggest issue is that more official channels, like universities, do not participate in the industry and are completely unaware, typically, that standards are discussed and published. This undermines much of this effort, but the information is out there.

These practices are not (yet) widely acknowledged and often intentionally not made known for security reasons.