Last week, I wrote about how companies are paying closer attention to the architecture, products, and decision-makers for branch office IT.

Getting some structure around how branch offices provide IT services, applications, and data to users is no doubt a positive development. But it also raises a question: How stringent should IT staffs make these rules for product and service selection?

My short answer: Strict, but not to the point that they are completely inflexible.

If central IT has conducted research in any product category, and from that research concluded specific vendors provided the best functionality, customer service, value, etc., there would be little reason to divert from those vendors. So it is vital that organizations assemble a governance board that works with purchasing to authorize buying only approved products and services.

Giving individual branch offices the authority to divert from the overall corporate IT architecture causes the same problems many companies face today—islands of communications with little or no interoperability between products and features.

There are some instances, however, where I have seen good reason to divert from the approved products. For example, suppose an organization decided to select Avaya for its worldwide VoIP project. But in certain remote, international branch offices, shipments were slow or local services were unavailable. In those cases, it may be better for the company to select an alternative provider, providing it could interoperate with the rest of the company, typically via SIP links.

In other cases, I have seen organizations that require a certain feature that is not available in the approved product or service. For example, some telecommuter contact-center agents for a healthcare provider could not use the DSL service prescribed for their locale because they did not have broadband available. As a result, they used satellite broadband service.

The key is that there must be a valid reason for departing from the norm. This comes up most frequently in global organizations. We see central IT selecting Cisco networking equipment, for example, and sometimes European offices complain the vendor is too “Americentric.” Is that a good enough reason to use an alternative provider? No. But if they can explain how being Americentric affects their ability to get their jobs done in a productive, efficient way, then it would be.

Robin Gareiss is executive vice president and senior founding partner of Nemertes Research. Click  here for the newsletter archive.