End hiding the script contents here. It can affect every component of costs. Standards can reduce initial acquisition costs of hardware and software, reduce the costs of training and upgrades, reduce system development costs, and reduce the among of time required to diagnose and repair both hardware and software problems.
Free choice is antithetical to efficient support.
We either need to confine the use of technology to standards or to increase our budgets to deal with diversity. The very real potentials of interoperability, decentralized independent software development or acquisition, and independence from proprietary systems will fail if the institution does not first succeed at further establishing and adhering to standards. Adhering to established standards and mainstream products across the entire institution make it more likely that the infrastructure can be efficiently managed. These are particular opportunities for small colleges that are often unavailable to large universities. The resulting architecture not only simplifies the maintenance of all hardware and software systems, it also generates substantial savings in maintenance cost and reduced support staff requirements.