A good CIO will stay on top of the latest frameworks and formulas -- but they don't have to implement all of them Dear Bob …This might be a case of “be careful what you ask for.” The board and executive committee in my company have started to read about the alphabet soup of IT methodologies, and they’re asking me why we aren’t implementing (depending on the week) ITIL, CobiT, and CMMi.[ Also on InfoWorld: Bob dispels other myths about best practices in “Run IT as a business — why that’s a train wreck waiting to happen” | Get sage IT career advice from Bob Lewis’ Advice Line newsletter. ] Last week, the CFO asked if the company should be pursuing enterprise architecture. I tap-danced.To give you an idea, we’re a small services company — 125 employees total, with five of us in IT. Very entrepreneurial — the CEO lands cool deals and we all figure out how to deliver what he promised.It’s chaos and a lot of fun. That’s what I tell my team when they gripe about the chaos, at any rate, and truth be told, it’s how I like it. I think about what we’d have to do to build a configuration management database and convene a change control board, to take an example, and break out in a rash.Am I just projecting my personal likes and dislikes onto the company, and we should be getting more organized? Or am I right in thinking trying to comply with these methodologies would slow us down to a crawl and take away the only competitive advantage we have?– Cowboy Dear Cowboy …Well, pardner, that’s quite a chunk of chaw you bit off. Let’s see how you can corral the felines without shooting yourself in the foot.OK, that’s enough of the phony old-west talk. To business: I have no idea whether your reaction is due to your psychology or good judgment. That’s between you and your shrink.The view from here is that every so-called IT best practice I’ve ever investigated was built to support very large enterprises. To give you an idea of what I mean, I’m in the middle of yet another one, and the author describes an $8 billion multinational enterprise as a midsize business.Here’s my advice: Familiarize yourself with all of these frameworks and methodologies. They’ll have ideas you can put to productive use. They’ll also have many ideas that would cripple your organization, so pick and choose carefully. At your size, you should keep your focus on building a very clean technical architecture. Do that and you’ll be in a position to enable business agility instead of quickly becoming a bottleneck.Second: You’re in an excellent position to take advantage of cloud computing, particularly what’s coming to be called infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). To the extent you’re able to do this, you can keep your staff focused on the application layer, which is where all the business value comes from.Personally, I’d avoid platform-as-a-service (PaaS) providers, not because what they offer doesn’t work, but because right now there’s too little assurance any of these players will be around for the long haul to provide continuity of development environments. Having to convert because your PaaS provider left the business would be somewhere between embarrassing and killing the entire enterprise dead. If you aren’t convinced, do some research on the history of Pandesic. It isn’t a perfect parallel, but it’s close enough to drive the point home.In any event, my advice is to be selective. When your executive team asks, let them know you’re keeping track of all of them, applying their underlying principles where they fit your business, and being very careful to avoid applying those principles designed to prevent entrepreneurship — which is to say, most of them.– Bob This story, “Experts are not to be trusted,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’s Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com. CareersCloud Computing