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For IT, there’s a classic—almost epic—tension between flexibility and control. It’s the idealized hope for diversity reeled in by the practical need for standardization.

You can see this tension play out as the saga between application development and IT operations today. On the “apps” side, you see the passionate idealist—the artist who sees nothing but possibilities. On the “ops” side, you see the pragmatic realist—the analyst who knows the costs of these possibilities all too well.

As the action unfolds, you see application development make its plea:

• Please add the platform components that my application requires.
• Please remove the platform components that conflict with my application.
• Please don’t force me to upgrade to the latest platform.

The conflict builds as IT operations responds:

• Use the standard platform we’ve provided.
• Upgrade to the latest version.
• IT can no longer afford to support all of these variants to suit your needs.

And there lies the heart of this conflict: For IT, the cost of managing diversity is staggeringly high. Provisioning and maintaining software is complex enough in the best of circumstances. But when versions, variants and customizations proliferate, IT is left to care for a complexity mess of massive proportion.

There is no antagonist in this story. It’s not about right and wrong, parsimonious and profligate. In fact, there’s wisdom and good intention on both sides. It’s a story of naturally opposing interests finding their equilibrium—quite rationally—in the form of a new model that accommodates both flexibility and control.

You can see the same drama play out in the world of manufacturing. (OK, software is technically a form of manufacturing, but I mean the traditional form of manufacturing where you can more readily drop something on your foot.)

In this world, the demand side of the business (think of it as “apps”) puts pressure on the supply side (think of it as “ops”) to customize products to suit the (faddish, fickle, fleeting) markets they serve. Of course the supply side resists; the cost of retooling, producing and maintaining such diversity is way too high.

So high, in fact, that Henry Ford famously declared the Model T would come in any color the American public desired, so long as it was black. Ford, like others, recognized that the cost of maintaining many versions and variants of complex systems as a matrix (many parts, many versions) is nothing short of crushing.

This recognition gave rise to mass customization, a manufacturing model that allowed great flexibility in product specification without the incremental management overhead. Today, mass customization allows manufacturing organizations to have their cake and eat it too—flexibility and control.

It’s achieved by blending the best of standardization and customization—the “base” components are standardized and the “customized” aspects are layered on top. The lifecycle of each variant is managed rigorously to prevent chaos.

Think of the example of an automobile. The same chassis may support the minivan and SUV, but the functionality and fit-and-finish are quite different.

We see the same dynamic playing out in IT. The solution isn’t clamping down on software diversity—that’s too constraining. It’s also not about accepting diversity at any cost. It’s about changing the model by which we manage software—which brings us back to the saga of apps and ops.

Today, IT is under pressure to modify OS and middleware platforms to suit the needs of diverse and ever-changing applications. For IT operations, the inclination is to standardize on a single off-the-shelf platform.

But that’s not practical. Today, IT is forced to provision and maintain multiple platform versions and variants—without a control model for doing so. They’re forced to trick out the Model T when they’re only set up to support one-size-fits-all. IT accommodates because they don’t want to stand in the way of application innovation—but their acquiescence comes at a very high cost.

rPath was designed to tackle this very challenge. It provides a highly scalable management model for diverse software systems, allowing IT operations to take on ever more variability without an ounce of added cost. It’s a model for mass customization of software systems—IT can have its cake and eat it, too.

This week, rPath announced a management solution for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, allowing Red Hat customers to bring this level of flexibility and control to the diverse software systems they’re wrestling with.

You can also attend the webinar we’re hosting on Dec. 10th with Linux Magazine and featuring Lee Thompson, former chief technologist at  E*TRADE FINANCIAL, to learn how you can have your cake and eat it, too.

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Jake Sorofman is vice president of marketing for rPath, an innovator in automating application deployment and maintenance across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Learn more about rPath at http://www.rpath.com, follow rPath on Twitter at @rpath and contact Jake at jsorofman@rpath.com.

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