Application Standards & Governance

A last practical word on Application Standards and its enforcement. How successful are organisations at applying Application Development Principles and Standards? In my experience, not always very successful. I would like to hear comments from others, but my feeling is the larger the IT community of an organisation, the more difficult it will be to govern development efforts. In the organisation where I work currently, the discipline of developing applications against a set of principles or standards, is seriously lacking. I also think that development should be governed from a central “authority” but in a collaborative fashion - not a policing approach.