Gregory Maciag

Fallacies: Standards Are A Cost

Some say: “Standards are a cost.”   Actually, standards are an investment. This is a completely different department. You wouldn't confuse the money you paid for an income-yielding security with what you paid for a new car. Similarly, people ought not to confuse IT as a cost of doing business with standards as an investment in the business.

Here's an analogy. Everybody has to eat, and food costs money. So food is part of the cost of living. But this doesn't mean it's just a cost. You can eat healthily or unhealthily. Certain food choices are like investments. You might even invest in the guidance of a dietitian or a cookbook. This isn't wasted money: it's carefully directed investment. 

We live in the information age, we have to process and store and exchange information. The question is: Do we want to do that in a smart way, or a dumb way? Do we want to maximize the value of our information and our ability to profit from it? Do we want to make sure we'll still be around in the future to continue our business? If so, we need standards. 

Now, you don't invest all your money. You need some of it to live on, and some to enjoy. When you invest, you probably balance the risks you buy into. It's the same with business technology. Most of your budget goes toward keeping the lights on and keeping pace with growing volumes and speeds. Some of it should also go into the no-risk, ultra-high-return vehicle of standards. This is because it's precisely standards that are going to lower your “lights on” and “keep up” costs! Organizations have to run to stand still. Standards do most of the running for you.

Open Data: Knowledge Gaps

A recent survey of the UK public sector found that 72% of staff knew about open data and its importance. 52% recognized that access to data – and to data standards – will generate growth in public and private sectors. This sounds encouraging until you learn the UK has an ambitious open data agenda, and wants to be a leader in this area. You'd expect recognition of the basic messages to be higher.

More worrying, 78% didn't know what open data initiatives are going on, or what their benefits are meant to be. 75% didn't know about sources of data outside of their department that might help them do their jobs. It seems some headline messages have got through, but there's low awareness of practical matters. The survey results give open data advocates and program leaders a basis on which they can build. It looks like the next step should be outreach. Time to connect the dots.  Transparency Hub

Rules Decisions & Standards

While pondering the difficulties still faced by enterprises employing a business rule management system (BRMS) and attempting to fully enable business users, I see yet another wave of standards coming our way. Standards for rules have been attempted in a variety of ways over the years. Each attempt provided some valuable insight but none really answered the call. This got me to thinking about the how far the field has come in terms of approach and execution but not in terms of standardization. Read more on Standards from ACORD and others at Brian Stucky

Standards Consolidation

Steve Keifer wrote a thoughtful piece about the proliferation of B2B standards back in 2009. Looking back on it, one pattern seems clear to me. Standards emerge in the areas where they are needed – domains where different parties need to share data with each other. Standards converge when different parties realize they can simplify their transactional behavior.

So, over time, the standards population waxes and wanes. We saw a burst of B2B standards when industries started to connect online. We now see a shrinkage as these standards converge. But the smaller standards population that results is stronger, more resilient and more useful than the plethora it replaces.

It would be nice if everyone got right-size standards right from the start. However, we're dealing with evolution here. Industries must go through the expansion phase before they can successfully consolidate, and move forward on a strengthened, unified basis.  The Long Tail of eCommerce Standards

Harmonization

Standards are what we do, but “standardization” has a negative ring to it. Harmonization is better – and, as time goes by, is more accurate.

You create standards where confusion and needless complexity reign. Industries – and pockets within industries – establish standards that address their needs. Over time, these different communities begin to deal with each other, or to extend their existing communications. The next challenge becomes negotiating between standards.

Sometimes translation will work. In many cases, translation becomes institutionalized within some kind of hub, or translation facility. Sometimes one community recognizes the other community's standards will work for both. Sometimes the two communities merge and blend their standards.

The common theme in all these solutions is that ad hoc arrangements are replaced by something permanent. So, this is a kind of standardization, even if no new standards are created. Let's call it harmonization. Different voices, singing together. We don't want everybody to be the same – we want everybody to get along.   Let's hear it for harmony.

Data First

The Intersection blog at insurance-canada.ca asks for opinions on the “data first” strategy for systems modernization. Bruce F. Broussard Jr of Insurity says that the environment for data first has improved due to “several developments over the past few years (which) have changed the insurance data landscape, most notably the maturity and acceptance of industry standard ACORD data structures.”

Data first – it's got to be. Data is what this industry does. It's the raw material and the end product. It's everything in insurance. Data first and last. Insurance-Canada

Cities Sponsoring Standards

A thought: Cities are often known for the industries concentrated there, or the cultural artefacts created there. Weeds may be growing in parts of Detroit, but it will always be Motor City. Vienna will always have the waltz, great cake and Freud.

In our information age, cities will also be known for their excellence or influence in information technologies – which are, I guess, the ultimate combination of industry and culture. Silicon Valley already has this reputation. Cities and regions around the world continually try to create their own “Silicon X”. There's even a “Silicon Roundabout” in London.

Here's what I'm thinking. The breakthroughs in technology over the next few years may not come from new types of device, but from ways of using ubiquitous, connected technologies. Cities that invent, host or promote tools and processes that serve this environment can gain recognition and prestige when their innovations are taken up globally.

The Babylonians gave us math. Maybe British Columbia will give the world a traffic data standard: “Open North is working towards a data standard for traffic data, such as accidents or roads closures, with Open511. In B.C., many travellers depend upon DriveBC to find out about road closures or weather conditions. The goal of Open511 is to make a traffic data standard that would be adopted by jurisdictions around the world, so your experience getting information on road conditions or closures is consistent from B.C. to Arizona.”

If the protocol that wirelessly connects your phone to your laptop can be called Bluetooth, there's no reason why we couldn't all be using DriveBC – in Australia as well as Arizona. So here's a possible new source of civic pride and regional leadership. Let's have more communities come forward to sponsor standards – to the world's benefit.  Data BC

Standards Taking Root

How's your social media monitoring? Personally, I use fairly crude methods, including, at number one, keeping my ears open. Another quick and effective way of taking the temperature is to do a Google search on your topic of interest, restricting the search to the last month or week. Do this regularly and you may notice shifts in the kinds of results you get.

I've noticed that Googling “data standards” gives very different results than a few years ago. It used to be people were publishing and posting about the value of standards. I see very little of that now. These days, the results are split evenly between job ads and announcements of new standards in new fields.

This tells me two things. The ads tell me standards have become a key requirement in job designs across many corporates. “Data standards” sometimes appears in the job title itself. We've always advocating making standards champions within organizations, so it's good to see this taking root. The ads show that organizations value standards and are using them as core assets.

Second, the appearance of data standards in so many disparate domains tells me people understand the foundational and co-operative benefits of standards like never before. Now, when organizations and individuals in a domain think about working together, they think about sharing information. And they then naturally set about agreeing a standard. It's less and less the case that people seek to apply standards retrospectively, after they've let unnecessary complexity evolve. So the world is getting smarter – and this is thanks to the success of previous standards creators, adopters and implementers. These everyday visionaries have played a major part in improving the way people work together today – and tomorrow.

Supporting Award ID

“Benjamin Franklin once wrote that nothing can be said to be certain 'except death and taxes.' If Ben were still around, he might now say: 'except death, taxes, and inconsistent federal data standards.'’

Kathleen Tighe, Chair of the Recovery Board and Inspector General at the Department of Education  notes that the issue of data standards in federal government was first raised in 1965, and revisited in 1974. “Nothing much has happened in the intervening years, however,” she says. “It’s about time to do something.”

She makes the argument that data standards “would permit data sharing among agencies, save lots of money, and vastly improve the quality of information, including details on how the government spends your money.” In its four years of existence, the need for consistent data standards is the most important thing the Recovery Board has learned. If gas stations can have standard nozzles, and diamonds are assessed by the same criteria all over the world, and even baseballs are manufactured to strict standards, government can surely do better.

Tighe's recommended starting point for data standards in government is a universal award ID for all contracts, grants and loans. This would be seem to be an essential part of government accountability. We need a campaign!   Recovery Blog

Standards: Rightsizing Complexity

Some complexity is necessary. If you're serving an inherently complex business process, then failing to reflect this complexity in a systems design will lead to poor functioning and error. But much of the complexity we find in information systems isn't this kind of good complexity. It's complexity grown out of systems development, maintenance and integration. It's the kind of complexity that grows like topsy.

There's one kind of needless complexity that can be tackled relatively easily. This is the complexity created by failures to use relevant data standards. Generally speaking, the best way to reduce complexity of any kind is to restrict choice. This is what regulations do. For example, you don't get to be creative about which side of the road you drive on.

Standards work in a similar way. Standards reduce choice where choice is at best unnecessary, at worst downright dangerous. A data standard restricts the rights of participants to deviate from agreed norms of behavior and flows of communication.

Good standards are non-arbitrary mechanisms for restricting choice. The form of such a standard is derived from the natural characteristics of the business being served. (Which side of the road we drive on can be based on a coin toss, but the structure of an insurance policy record had better be based on insurance policies.)

Great standards go beyond good standards by exploiting choice restriction so as to enable and encourage growth and innovation. Such standards model the business they serve with a whole-industry coherence, rather than focusing only on islands of interest.

Decision theory has a concept known as bounded rationality. This is the idea that anyone's ability to make a decision is limited by the information they have, their ability to process it, and the time available. It's a major corrective to the basic idea in economics that people make optimal choices based on perfect information. I bring this up because it seems to me that an industry data standard is a map of the bounded rationality of the community that creates and exploits it. Data standards are significant artefacts which express the information capabilities of a group of participants.

So, when you deploy industry standards you anchor your organization's information activities in explicit statements of competence. By adhering to standards, you are using as much or as little complexity as is really needed to get the job done. Not too much, not too little, but just right.

Standards for M&A

Companies involved in M&A know that aligning and integrating systems is rarely a walk in the park. Robert Fox warns that alignment and integration shouldn't be a one-time deal. Standards are at the core of a successful, long-term strategy which will also make the new entity more amenable to future M&A activity.

Sand Hill

Standards: Efficiency First

Data standards have immediate, obvious value in industries where tangible products are moved among participants. If you're building automobiles, you know you're involved in supply chains. To make those chains as efficient as possible, participants sign up for data standards that will speed the identification, logging, receiving and storage of parts and products. Standardization also brings easier quality control, safety and disposal management, among other benefits.

Despite the fashion for seeing the world in terms of networks, it's a curious fact that people in non-tangibles don't always realize they're involved in supply chains too. They don't see that the information flowing among partners is their shared endeavor. And how failing to make information flow as efficiently as possible threatens agility, quality and profitability – for everyone in the chain. This is often why standards aren't on their radar.

We can try to fix people's understanding, and get them to see how they're part of a dynamic, collaborating enterprise that crosses organizational boundaries and evolves over time. This might raise awareness, which is always a good thing, but it doesn't necessarily lead to a clamor for standards. It's management who need to get the message.

Standards continue to create benefit for businesses and consumers alike. This is partly because even if you don't conceptualize yourself as being in a value chain, anyone involved in insurance has to cooperate with others. People feel pressure from those relying on them, while putting pressure on those whose input they themselves need. So, while insurance is a non-tangible type of business, it has developed a high regard for the value of standards.

It's a different story in the financial industry. Here, although people are also closely involved in chains, there's more of a culture of independence. The packaging or securitization of debt is a prime example of how finance works to transform flows into products, so they can be traded more anonymously. This encourages people to ignore the interdependencies they are creating. And there is less of an interest in standards, because every deal is (supposedly) unique. Of course, there are exceptions when it comes to transactional business, credit cards and markets.

The good news is that the most important area for standards development, namely health, is following more in the insurance mold than the financial mold. Health professionals from different disciplines realize they are collaborating in complex chains serving the needs of the patient. They know those chains have to be both strong and slick. Standards are key to their success.

Efficiency isn't for nerds. It's for everyone. It's the basis on which we can build real value. Standards aid efficiency, and efficiency is the parent of effectiveness.

Fallacies About Standards

Like Standards Make Work for instance.  Lurking in the background of some resistance to standards is a reluctance to learn something new, even if it will bring benefits. This reluctance is very close to the feeling we can get when we think about changing an unhelpful habit. Yes, going to the gym will be good for me and it will be fun but you know what? Sitting here is just great too.

The rational arguments for standards always go though. No one can seriously argue with saving time and money by using standards. The logic is unassailable. And for folks who don't care for logic, the evidence of successful implementations is overwhelming.

But rational arguments don't touch our emotional reasons for sticking with what we know. Despite the fact that everyone knows we must deal with change, human beings aren't great at contemplating change. Note, I'm not saying we're bad at changing. Actually, humans are incredibly successful adapters. It's the thinking-about-it part we don't like.This uneasiness about change often gets rationalized. We look for a more intellectual basis for our gut feelings. This is where the “standards make work” claim can come in.

Basically, it goes like this. Standards may well save us time and money. But I don't have the time and money to implement standards. To embrace standards fully, I'd have to stop what I'm doing, and I can't do that.One person's discomfort about change speaks to another's fear of standing back from the day-to-day. And this is not a good hook-up.This is the heart of the problem: we're not dealing with one party's emotional intelligence, but two. We can't just keep educating the reluctant implementer. We also have to help the gatekeepers and sanction-holders. We need to turn them into advocates of standards too.

The way forward here is to encourage a small but significant shift in thinking. Standards make work?

Actually, Standards make it work.

The 3 Opens

Open Source, Open Data, Open Standards... Chris Ewing writes a post aimed at untangling the confusion surrounding these terms. I think people are reasonably well informed about what open source means. At least, they know it's about software development. However, I can see why people stumble over “open data” and “open standards”. It's because we should more correctly say “open data” and “open data standards”.

To me, “open standards” are products of a community-driven process which are available to the sponsoring community and beyond, and which are not controlled by any sectional interest. For example: ACORD Standards.  The open data movement is a great thing, and we need standards for open data. But let's not forget that we also need open standards for plain old data.  Opens

Empathy

The ACORD community can demonstrate a type of behavior that's becoming, sadly, less common: a group of passionate people, with divergent opinions and interests to advance and defend, arguing reasonably with each other and coming to an agreement.

How come participants in standards can manage this and politicians can't – or won't?  It's not because the politicians are playing for higher stakes. They may think they're important, but their real power seemingly lies in the ability to delay events. The business and technical (and business/technical) people who get involved in standards are working to safeguard and expand the industry they jointly comprise. This is real existential stuff.

In his book about how moral psychology, The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt notes that the ending of practical bi-partisanship in Washington coincided with politicians deciding not to move their families to D.C.  In former times, people from opposing sides of a debate would mix with each other and their families. They lived in the same town and went to the same parties. It's hard to hate someone when your kids play together. It doesn't stop you opposing their views, but it helps you realise they're not aliens.

ACORD's achievements over the years rest partly on the smarts of the people involved, advances in technology and results on the ground. But a large part of the success is also due to people working together – in the same rooms, on the same threads, on the same calls.

Face time can look like lost time, if you only think about it in balance sheet terms. In reality, the time we spend together is a shrewd investment. As industry, commerce and government become ever more distributed, collaboration is key to delivery. No matter how smart our technology, people are the drivers.

Standards: Legislation Needed?

Blogger Bruce Badger reckons it's time legislators stepped in to enforce data standards for the British health service. In an open letter to his MP, he says: “The money recently wasted on NHS systems was wasted because the focus was on *systems* not on data format standards. […] The NHS spectacularly (if unsurprisingly) failed to make the perfect fits-all-needs system, but they could have defined a first version of a standard interchangeable patient record, or even just how medical image data would be exchanged.”

Badger's complaint was prompted when he was given a CD of medical scans – none of which he, or his doctor, could open. He proposes that images could be encoded in a standard format such as TIFF, and an open standard developed in XML for the structured data.

I'm as surprised as Badger must have been to discover that anyone is using a proprietary standard for image data. I'm a little depressed to know that some hospital went to the time and expense of burning a disk that is of no use to anyone. But I'm cheered to see that the remedy is obvious: standards.

Britain's NHS is a public service. If legislation is needed to make it do the right and obvious thing by data standards, then so be it. I can only guess that NHS procurement people have no incentive to ensure patient data can be shared – even when they are buying solutions that produce expensive, dud takeaways for the patient.

The OpenSkills Sett

Leading or Pre-empting?

In September 2012, the pharmaceutical industry launched TransCelerate – an organization tasked with creating common standards for clinical trials. Two weeks later, one of the industry's big players announced it would make its clinical trials data available immediately to business partners.

With TransCelerate's standards development work only barely begun, this could look like an attempt to pre-empt the eventual standards. If you put your large collection of data out into the community, then the community has to work with what you give them. There's no need for the donating company to translate its data. If the donor's formats become the de facto standard, then it will save money in perpetuity.

However, the pharma industry is dominated by a small number of big players. These leaders are likely to have a proportionately higher say in the crafting of standards than smaller players. They are also more likely to have the resources to assign to standards creation. They will certainly own the largest part of the existing data.

To take a pragmatic view, the faster members of a sector arrange to share their data, the better. Earlier sharing means earlier benefits – to organizations and their end users. The friction generated by the use of one participant's inhouse standard may be outweighed by the benefits of sharing. Also, as time goes by, it is likely that the user community – including the original donor – will press for any changes required to make the standard more effective.

From the donor company's point of view, I guess they see the release of their data as the main benefit they are giving the sector, and any implied standards pre-emption as an additional favor. This organization has presumably invested time, money and expertise in developing its clinical trials standards. Managers there will likely see the resulting formats not as local peculiarities, but as highly professional models of the clinical trials domain.

What is important is that this community continues to support and resource its shared standards efforts. Even if this early donation dominates initial standards creation, its influence will wane as development continues. Essentially, those inhouse resources previously invested in maintaining and developing an inhouse standard will become available to the wider community. The donating company will also begin to alter its own formats and practices in line with shared developments. In other words, everyone will evolve together.

Can the not-invented-here syndrome be beaten? If these unilaterally published standards are good standards, then they should be embraced and extended by the community. If not, not.  Seeking Alpha

Is Data the New Oil?

A piece about Scottish policy on data standards mentions how “futurist thinkers see data as the new oil”. As North Sea oil has long been a touchstone in discussions of Scotland's potential wealth as an independent nation, this implies quite a big claim. However, Dermot Joyce's article goes on to give examples of how data standards can improve efficiency and effectiveness in public services.

This is an anti-climax. For a minute, I thought Scottish data would somehow prove to be a great export, like malt whisky. Actually, the only “national” data set I can think of with potential commercial uses is the Icelandic genome. The article does not have much to say about how nationally applied data standards could aid the software or services industries of the nation which promotes them.

But I'd like to switch things around a little. Data may not necessarily be oil; but data standards are oil. Not the kind of oil you burn, but the oil you use to lubricate mechanisms. If, as the economist Ronald Coase said, inefficiencies like information search costs are the sand in the engine, then data standards are the engine oil.

Sure, data standards are absolutely vital to modern public services. They are also key to the development of knowledge industries. If you own or create potentially valuable data, then data standards will make that data usable. But just having data standards doesn't mean you automatically have data that's valuable to anyone else. It doesn't work that way.

Oil is oil. Data is what you make of it.

Meanwhile in Qatar, a railroad engineering software company is helping to build the Qatar Building Information Modelling (QBIM). All the data generated in its studies will be handed over to the customer and used to help populate this model. The engineers “hope they [the Qataris] create a neutral standard”. If they do, then they will really have created an important national asset.  Data Smart Nation

Standards and Decisions

Don't use data standards! When the business needs to record some item of data, just get it recorded in the quickest way possible. You can always find it later, using a search tool.

I guess no one would say the above statement out loud, but it's how a lot of organizations behave. What they're ignoring is that by avoiding standards, they are creating huge problems for themselves.  They're pursuing a false economy that is actually going to kill them.

Dylan Jones tells of a conversation he had with someone who implemented data standards for equipment recording. It wasn't glamorous, but it was of great benefit to the organization. Why? Because, with data standards in place, decision makers were now able to make decisions.

“Most think equipment naming standards are dull in the extreme but when they see the speed at which they can make decisions the light comes on,” Jones's contact told him. “Minutes of accurate decision making are now replacing months of indecision,” because managers can now compare devices, features, prices and so on.

People can forget that data standards have this great value in facilitating decision making. More worrying, they can forget that business is about making decisions. This is odd, because “agility” is the buzzword of our age, and agility is built on rapid, credible, decision making.  For all those working to construct and implement data standards, the appeal to decision making benefits is critical. Standards help us move data. They also help us move forward.  Dull but Decisive 

Majority Standards

Keith Robertory is a disaster technologist and educator. He makes a strong point in behalf of data standards when he says that standards depend on the people who use them. Whether or not a standard is approved by a governing body is beside the point.

For example: “In a meeting about missing persons' data standards it was stated that if the Red Cross, Facebook and Google agreed on a standard to share data, then everyone else will follow. Not because the three organizations are a governing committee but instead they would be the three largest players in the space.”

True, none of these organizations is a governing body. But they are, in the non-organizational meaning of the word, authorities. The Red Cross is an authority on missing persons because it has worked in that area for a long time. Facebook is an authority because it's a connector of people. Google is an authority because of its reputation for organizing material.

But do these three organizations fully represent the users of missing persons data? Wouldn't some insight from police and social services be useful too?  But Robertory is surely right in that looking to the major user groups for standards is the fastest way to build a standard. It's a good application of the 80:20 rule. But I'd want to see the standards setting process made more open to other users too. Robertoty

Standard Processes

Business processes form a vital asset of any organization. You could even say they're more important than the organization's people – because they encapsulate what the people do. But business processes are hard to get a handle on because they're abstract. Although we know business processes exist, and we're sure they could be improved, isolating and describing them is pretty tough.

One response to this is to simplify the approach and treat all business process analysis as a matter of drawing flow charts. This has a real intuitive appeal. Organizations exist to take stuff in, transform it in one or more ways, and then pass it back to the environment. If you're working with physical products, then your core activities will also generate information. But for many organizations, information is the actual product they're dealing with anyway.

We're used to flow diagrams – in all their different guises. They quickly suggest mechanical-type solutions: Jim has a type-T document land on his desk, he notes what's in Section G then sends copies to Josh and Joanne. Now, while this describes the path of a process neatly, it doesn't tell us about the business. To understand what is really going on here, we need to answer three questions: How do people interpret their inputs? How do they judge them? How do they decide where to direct them?

Jim must have a context – let's call it a frame – which he uses to recognize and “gut” type-T documents. He can pull what's relevant from such a document. He must also have some store of knowledge or rule base that allows him to make judgements on what he's interpreted. Finally, he needs to understand the responsibilities of others in the organization if he's to send the case on to its next stage.

Capturing the logic of a flow and its nodes allows us to build a machine that may help work get done. It can also expose detours and rework. By annotating models of existing processes with timestamps, we can determine where unproductive delays are occurring.

However, such models can't shed light on the knowledge processing being done by people like Jim. And this is where the distributed heart of the business lies.

The trend is to capture these elements of interpretation, judgment and direction as business rules. Clearly, people are applying rules when they perform these functions, although the rules may not always be easy to state in formalized terms. Some rules have fuzzy edges. And sometimes rules differ widely across similar functions.

My instinct is that targeting your analysis on rules will have a greater value to the business than just drawing flow diagrams. This is not to belittle process mapping, which is an important element in bringing abstract work to life and making it amenable to managed change. I also don't underestimate the difficulties associated with describing rules – the history of expert systems tells us it's far from easy.

I believe rules are worth pursuing because our experience of creating and maintaining data standards at ACORD shows how important it is for communities to agree on what is important to them ahead of how they represent it, store it and share it. Data modelers never tire of asking questions like: “What do you mean by customer?” Data standards users are delighted that they can answer, “We mean what everyone else means,” and point at the common definition used in their industry.

Organizations surely deserve a similar level of efficiency and certainty on the process side. We're at the stage where people are beginning to ask: “What information, rules and measures does Jim consider when he assesses a loan application?” But the answer ought to be obvious. It ought to be: “He's using the standards.”

Old Formats

The FDA still uses a format for exchanging data about drug studies which was introduced in 1999. The format doesn't include metadata so implementers use a separate XML file that describes the relationships buried in the data. Interestingly, the date stamp on the formatted file isn't Y2K compliant (although the data within the file is).

Does this matter? Some would say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But it seems to me that with the pace of change in our world, this is too complacent an attitude. More and more, you don't know something is broken until it meets a situation it can't handle – by which time it's too late.

I'd say that even the requirement to align a data format with a descriptive XML file is asking for trouble. Self-describing data has a whole, lengthy list of benefits for developers, integrators and users. A twin-file, “other-describing data” approach isn't the same thing at all.

Data Exchange Standards

Proprietary Process is Passe

A panellist from a big broker summarised how thinking about data and processes has changed in the industry. Speaking at ITC 2012, he said everybody is realizing what they thought were proprietary processes probably aren't – and if they are, they shouldn't be.

He went on to say his firm no longer writes software, and that everything they do with a counter-party is by necessity non-proprietary. The reality, he said, is that these processes don't bring competitive advantage. It's how well you perform them and how well you integrate them that count.

I applaud the idea that proprietary processes should be regarded with suspicion rather than pride. This is an important evolutionary stage in the industry's development. As outlined elsewhere at the Congress, people in the insurance industry need to know the difference between inventing and innovating, and when each is appropriate. We don't want to be inventing pieces of technology that already exist. We do want to innovate by exploiting what's already out there.

Standards are a Right...

When you get involved in developing and promoting data standards, you have many conversations around implementation. How can you help people use the standards? How can you ensure they start getting the business benefits of standards as quickly and thoroughly as possible? How can you spread the news?

Unless they have a short-term proprietary advantage in mind, most people accept the value of standards – intellectually. Embracing standards emotionally is a little tougher. What is there to love about a set of templates? Few of us love order for its own sake: and those who do may not have the best business instincts.

We need emotional engagement with standards if we're to achieve wide and rigorous implementation. Intellectual agreement and goodwill on their own don't make things happen. The key to emotional engagement with standards is not to focus on the inherent qualities of a standard, but on the better world that standards help to bring about.

It's my belief that no one should begin a career, or start a project, or take responsibility for a business area, that isn't founded on solid in-place standards. Foundation standards should be present and obvious in every field of endeavor. Absence of such standards must be seen as anomalous, wayward and unsupportable.

So, my approach to promoting full implementation of standards is to focus on the value of the goal, not the pleasures and hardships of the journey. Creating a standards-founded world – a world where everyone expects to work on a solid base of standards – isn't easy. Like most things that represent real progress, it's going to take time and effort.

It's not unlike having a clean water supply, or a trustworthy currency. If your people can rely on water and money that aren't going to poison or bankrupt them, they can do so much more with their lives. Similarly, if the people in your organization don't have to spend hours every day fetching dirty data from a distant well, they can get on with building the business. If they can trade data among themselves, with partners and with customers, knowing the data will always retain its value, then they can build greater knowledge, have better conversations, and develop more profitable relationships.  Let's declare standards to be a right, not a privilege. Can you imagine a world without them? Impossible.

Serving Specialists

John Hennessey, CEO Europe, CNA Insurance, in his keynote address to ITC 2012, quoted Bill Gates to the effect that applying technology magnifies efficient and inefficient processes alike. It's true: technology works like an amplifier or an accelerator. You have to be careful how you hook it up, or the results can be devastating.

He also said our industry is increasingly a world of specialists. The days of the generalist have gone and letting people “play with the sharp knives” can be dangerous. We need to support people at the front line so they can do their jobs well, and not expect them to perform every function required by the surrounding business process.

Hennessey also said that with continuing industry consolidation, the need for common business platforms will become more obvious to all. Common platforms will enable and liberate competition, not stifle it. (As Ian Summers said elsewhere, we must “collaborate to compete”.)

Pulling these thoughts together suggests we need to restrict the use of power tools and pay more attention to services. The aim of IT should be to get information to those who need it, as they need it. The all-singing, all-dancing applications suites we're used to on the desktop must yield to more streamlined services that match specific business processes. If this is the direction we're going in, then we'll need to pay closer attention to process analysis, and the ways in which people really work.

Steadfast Drives ACORD Standards in Australia

Robert Kelly, Steadfast Chairman, spoke at ITC 2012 on the benefits of ACORD Standards to the Australia insurance market.  Whether it was data messaging or ACORD Forms (something I remember proposing a few years back), he was ecstatic about the outcome.  Robert founded Steadfast (A network of brokers) and they are doing an IPO in 2013.

People are always looking for the seemingly illusive business case for industry standards. For Robert Kelly, ACORD Standards are just part of the business.  How refreshing!

Steadfast IPO

Steadfast Home Page

Is there a Single Version of the Truth?

Here is a view we published in Insurance Day this month. Meet IBM's Jeff Jonas.

Download ID 2012-10 Tech Focus

Clinical Trial Standards Cut Red Tape

“Why do some [companies] record that male is a 0 and female is a 1, and others use 1 and 0, and others use M and F. Where is there any competitive advantage to doing that?” says Garry Neil, interim CEO, Transcelerate Biopharma

Ten major drug companies have launched a non-profit organization to create industry data standards. The body, Transcelerate Biopharma, will focus on standards in non-competitive and collaborative aspects of drug trials.

The industry as a whole will save money, and time to market should improve. It's good to see another industry sector recognizing that working together on standards can raise the game for everyone. Standards don't mean uniformity of output. Standards enable excellence by tearing out pointless duplication, confusion and rework. In this way they promote competition.  Cut Red Tape

Centralization

During a workshop on data standards and the DATA Act, Bill Franks of Teradata said the first step toward cutting waste and streamlining data in government is centralizing how it’s managed. “This is not revolutionary or futuristic,” he said. “These are standard processes that commercial organizations do every day.”

That's not totally fair. There are plenty of commercial organizations who struggle to bring consistency and coherence to their data assets – and not just distributed or federated organizations. With the growing diversity of value chains, the concept of centralization is becoming even harder to turn into reality. Also, public servants have traditionally been pretty good at formulating standard processes and rolling them out.

It's not centralized repositories that will deliver data transparency to US citizens, but standard definitions, formats and relationships for data. Get the semantic architecture right, and a diversity of solutions can deliver our goals for more open government. Federal Standards

Standards: Implementation Time Too Late

Now we know the reason why the US Army went $6 bn over budget and 31 years (not a typo) behind schedule on 11 major systems developments: lack of data standards.

The Defense Department's Elizabeth McGrath told a Senate committee hearing: “In terms of passing the data from the legacy environment into the ERP, we do not have standard data across the enterprise, and so it becomes evident in the implementations.”

So, here we have a large and complex organization moving from a slew of legacy systems to modern ERP systems for applications like payroll. Does anyone share my surprise that the lack of standardized data only “becomes evident” during implementation?

Six billion dollars... You could build a bionic man for that money. And never in my worst nightmare have I ever imagined reporting a project 31 years overdue. This can't be the right way for people to learn that Data Standards Matter.

Public Sector IT

Standards: Engineers Hot Cold

Engineers have a love/hate relationship with standards, according to Patrick Kelly. I like his analysis, which takes as its base the idea that engineers like solving problems.

Engineers who want to solve a new problem can resent being told the solution – which is what a standard is. On the other hand, engineers who design standards are enthusiastic about the standards they develop – because they get to do problem-solving. And yet again, experienced engineers value standards because they don't want to solve the same problem over and over.

This chimes with something I often say about standards in both the business and the systems context. One of the great values of standards is that they enable you to shift what you could call the window of novelty. By standardizing elements of the business, you make headroom (and release investment) to focus on more critical areas. It's not just that reinventing the wheel is unnecessary – it's that it actively steals resources from inventing whatever really needs inventing.

The urge and skill to solve problems are wonderful qualities. We need more problem-solving spirit, not less. Standards can help us channel that enthusiasm and capability into areas of real benefit.

Intrastage

Open vs Proprietary

This is quite a long quote, but it tells the whole story of open vs proprietary standards:

“If you look at some of the key facets of cloud computing standards, they are not particularly mature. They are behind the times and they are always going to be behind the times. What we are seeing is that the vendors are moving faster than the standards bodies. What this results in is vendors are putting their own standards out there - vendor specific standards - in order to get certification. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but before you buy into a vendor standard, just think about what open standards are being developed. You may decide that you are happy to buy into a particular cloud vendor and you may decide that you aren't particularly worried about moving that service out if you are comfortable with the reliability being offered. But that's going to be the trade off.” - Paul Byons, BBC.

To drive the point home: the trade-off is about time. It's about whether you just get through today, or whether you spend today building a better tomorrow.

These are tough decisions to take. That's why they get taken high up in the organization. Decision makers can choose to lock themselves in – but they are obligated to know what they're getting into, why, and on what terms.

I'd add that on the experience of every technology wave to date, cloud vendors will in any case end up adopting common standards or fizzling out. Your vendor's attitude to standards down the road is therefore key even to consciously short-term decisions.

CIO IN

Standards Vision

“When is the last time you heard a vendor proudly say that their product or service was closed and proprietary?  However, it also seems that every time a new IT architecture sweeps through the market [...], the lessons of the critical value of standards needs to be relearned.”

Matthew Gardiner, writing about security standards for cloud applications, gives a shrewd account of the eternal tension between the idea of standards and the actual implementation of standards. “Why is it,” he says, “that everyone loves standards in concept, including those for security, but often standards definition and deployment is less than speedy? Why doesn’t everyone involved just pull together and solve this obvious problem now, instead of waiting until we are all suffering from lack of standards?”

One answer he gives is a lack of vision on the part of the customer. It's a controversial remark, but made with justice. Gardiner is referring to a lack of long-term thinking on the part of customers, who use proprietary interfaces because that's what's available from vendors. The need to take decisions for today rather than tomorrow has the unfortunate consequence of making tomorrow worse than it needs to be.

And there's a vicious circle here. If customers buy proprietary because that's what's available, then vendors have no incentive to shift to standards. In fact they have every incentive to focus on protecting their proprietary intellectual property and targeting market share over long-term customer value.

Happily, I see standards organizations not as third parties in this dilemma, but as agencies of the industry. Good standards bodies represent the needs and goals of the customers. They work to reconcile and balance the requirements of all stakeholders in the industry. They can therefore be a more considered, aggregated voice for the customer community.

But I must stress that this benefit extends to vendors too. As players in the development and implementation of standards, vendors get to contribute to the forward engineering of the industry's capabilities. Instead of competing for market share based on proprietary offerings, they can work to continually raise the baseline of performance across the industry – and then compete on real value-adds in a much larger market.

Cloud Security Alliance

Reuse is a Good Thing

A slogan is born! I've extracted this from a piece by Ben Allen at Appian Insight: “data standardization combined with process flexibility”.

Allen's context is defense procurement, however his formula will resonate with solution vendors and IT architects across the board. The next step is to get people to see that “flexibility” isn't the same as “peculiarity”. The aim is to do processes well, not weirdly. In achieving excellence in process delivery, systems designers will inevitably find themselves coming up with similar solutions to common problems. That's what the software design patterns movement is all about.

Designers need to concentrate on the real differences in their approaches to a business problem or challenge, and not be afraid to reuse answers that others have proven. This is the sense of “flexibility” we should have in mind when we cheer Allen's slogan.

Standards and Flexibility

Russia Moves to World Standards

Here is a copy of a Press Release translated from Russian.

The representatives of Russian insurance companies signed today a “memorandum about the cooperation of participants in the Russian insurance market and ACORD.

Memorandum attaches the intentions of sides on interaction for purposes of the introduction of standards and the best world practitioner in the Russian insurance branch.  Signing took place within the framework the round table “OF ACORD in Russia”, organized BY ANES “the technologies of the insurance market” and for the dedicated to questions creation of favorable environment for the development of insurance technologies in Russia, and also to advance of the ideas, which facilitate an increase in the insurance market and an increase in his [tsivilizovannosti]. 

“The signing of memorandum has for us enormous value, since initiates the process of the appearance in Russia of the international insurance standards, the need for which is dictated by the development of the market for insurance services, stated Igor [Khromov], leader of the committee ANE „of the technology of insurance market “on the business processes and the standards. - Especially urgent this becomes in connection with the introduction of Russia in [VTO]. Analogous process on the market for bank services in its time led to the appearance in Russia of an international bank standard SWIFT”.

The introduction of standards ACORD will contribute to an increase in general [tsivilizovannosti] of the market for insurance services, to the essential reduction of the operating expenses of participants in the market, to an improvement in the quality of business processes, to an increase in their competitive ability, including with respect to the external players, who accomplish expansion for the Russian market.

“If the important players of insurance business in Russia form the consolidated position and will be obtained the support of regulatory organs, then it is possible boldly to design for the maximum complete and rapid introduction of the standards of the description of business processes, formats of exchange of data carriers and utilized documents, noted It [pyunit] [Baral] (Puneet Of bharal), head of [konsaltingovogo] subdivision ACORD on Great Britain and Europe. - Having moreover, spent very modest resources, entire market will obtain the possibility to use results of long-standing efforts for the improvement of the business processes of the chief players of world insurance market”.

ACORD is the global non-commercial association of insurers, into tasks of which enters the assistance to development and to the use of standards in the region of insurance, [perestrakhovaniya] and the financial branches connected with them. Services ACORD use hundreds of companies, which carry out insurance and [perestrakhovaniem], and also thousand agents and brokers, different organizations of financial sphere, the suppliers of software and different branch organizations in the entire world.

Autonomous nonprofit organization “technologies of insurance market” ([ANK] “OF [TSR]”) is formed in 2012. By its mission [ANK] “OF [TSR]” proclaims creation on the Russian insurance market for the [mediynoy] structure, which moves the ideas, which facilitate an increase in the market and an increase in its [tsivilizovannosti], which consolidates the interests of its chief players. Questions of the standardization of insurance activity will become one of the basic directions of the activity of organization to the near period.  Investfunds

Data Flow

Nancy Fabozzi, principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan, comments that the lack of data standards for Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is hindering the ability of hospitals to exchange data. “One diagnosis can be referred to in many different ways. Without standards around patient identification, clinical data and terminology, the quality of data may be questioned.” Poor quality data can lead to poor care.

In connection with data integration, she says: “Hospitals have not done a good job of putting all their data pieces together within the organization as well as external to the organization. Digitizing the data is the first step, but the data also has to flow.”

To me, these issues are the same. You can only successfully integrate data around common definitions. And you can only successfully exchange data if the transacting partners share a set of common definitions.

It's helpful to think in terms of flow rather than standardization for its own sake. People sometimes think data standards are just for those with very, very organized minds. But standards are vital to everybody – because they create flow. Data has to flow through the organization and to partners, customers and regulators. Whatever your industry, you need flow. Hospital Review

Standards Acceptance

Jiyan at BuildZoom includes this as one of his four conclusions about the current state of Big Data:  “There is broad cultural acceptance of the value associated with common data formats as well as growing adoption of data standards across multiple societal levels.”

He mentions RSS, geotagging and open social media APIs as examples of the growth of technical standards. He also refers to Google's increasing focus on semantic search.

My own take is that standards at the technical level are a done deal. I think this has been true ever since the appearance of IP and HTML. But standards at the business level are still poorly served in many areas of life.

It's good to see the US government taking a lead in standards for its data and of course great standards work continues to be done in all kinds of industries. However, we must not relax our efforts to bring the benefits of standards to all aspects of human interaction. More and more groups recognize the critical importance of business data standards, and they continue to find each other and collaborate. Long may this process continue.  Structure and Big Data

London - ACORD Standards Sucess to Boost Modernisation

E-accounting success could ensure other London market modernisation initiatives continue to gather momentum. This could impact the markets work in endorsements and placing in particular according to Simon Squires of the Lonodn Market Group as reported by Greg Dobie at Insurance Day.  They exchange data in a structured format using standard messages from the industy standards body ACORD.  Insurance Day  (This is one of many stories that I post about the value of industry standards. All made possible by forward thinking firms that help us create and maintain the standards.)

 

Standards by Default

PSP, who look after data standards for leisure vehicles like motorcycles and powerboats, illustrate the benefits of standards with ATMs. They point out that today we expect any card to work in any machine, but that customers used to be restricted to using particular banks or networks of banks.

I like the use of ATMs to demonstrate standards in action. PSP explain the introduction of industry standards for ATMs as a recognition that fragmentation didn't serve customers well.

I wonder if that's the whole story, though. Perhaps another factor was the exhaustion of potential sites for ATMs, meaning that banks could only reach wider areas if they shared their ATM networks. Also, I'd bet that software development costs for ATMs fell once standards were introduced. Vendors would be able to target a common platform for their applications rather than producing different versions of essentially the same programs for the different bank brands.

PSP is not wrong, and they're not trying to build a complete, 360 degree case for standards in this illustration. However I think it's worth remembering that while customer convenience is a benefit of standards, it is rarely the sole factor in driving standards adoption. In my experience and the experience of many ACORD members I've spoken with, the case for standards is multifaceted and, in the final analysis, so core to business survival and growth that it more or less writes itself.

Standards underwrite so many business benefits that decision makers are better off asking why standards should not be used. There's no competitive advantage in keeping your ATMs separate from everyone else's – actually, there are clear disadvantages in terms of lost customer touchpoints. We need to shrink the period during which we regard a new technology on its own as a competitive advantage. Businesses in all sectors have learned that it's not the technology that differentiates you, but what you do with it, and how you integrate it in your business processes.

PSP

Beyond Standards Publication - We Need Tools

“Despite increasing public support (as well as a number of executive mandates) publishing public data in a machine-readable format is not as simple as pressing the 'publish' button. Why? Equally important as exposing the information itself is fostering a vibrant developer ecosystem around it. By making the publishing agency, not the public, responsible for making information immediately useful, government can lower the barriers associated with consuming its data and introduce additional citizen services at little to no cost to the agency.”

Thus Benjamin J. Balter of the SoftWare Automation and Technology (SWAT) Team in the Executive Office of the President.  Balter hits the nail squarely on the head. To publish is never enough. This is also a core truth of data standards. Standards are for implementing, not reading. It's increasingly clear that the bodies charged with developing and promoting standards on behalf of their host communities are also obligated to bring those standards to life. In the past, this has meant advocacy, education and training. Those activities will continue, but they must be joined by tools and services that give direct access to standardized data and processes.

Also, note that Balter says that a more active publishing organization actually saves the wider community money. His argument translates easily into a more diverse business domain. In the case of the insurance industry, the equivalents of the agency and the public are one and the same group: the business community, served by its neutral standards organization.  Government CIO

Protective Standards

I just viewed a very small slide set about pathways to data standards. It comes from the health domain, but it applies universally. It's short, but it contains pithy observations on how standards develop, and it's particularly sharp on proprietary versus non-proprietary standards.

I want to highlight the final bullet point: “Standards can be as much about protection of an industry or the companies in that industry, as it can be about progress or innovation.”

I guess that the authors' angle is that (proprietary) standards can be attempts to erect barriers to market entry or customer defection. They're maybe warning us that some standards can inhibit their users.

But I'd like to take the comment another way. Progress and innovation are absolutely at the core of protection. So these two characteristics of standards are actually complementary. Standards that enable companies and industries to survive and grow are certainly “protective”. But not in a bad way.

Data Standards Paths

IT Strategy

“The role of technology strategy is to examine the core business function that a company wants to pursue, and to determine how the path of the business will align with technology developments going forward and the business opportunities the company may take. The strategist must also consider which opportunities will fail, are uncertain, or as yet unknown - in addition to considering the aspects of the business that work well with technology today, but may or may not thrive into the future.” - Stefan Dietrich, CITOResearch.com

We oftentimes take “strategy” just to mean a choice from a selection of options. Dietrich reminds us that strategy is actually about dealing with what the future may throw at us. As decision makers, our job is to make the best decisions we can today for the brightest future we can construct. With the uncertainties inherent in this responsibility, we do well to maximize flexibility, use common goods and evolve incrementally. Data standards demonstrate these three virtues, giving organizations adaptable assets that are shared by the community and designed for controlled, continuous improvement. Standards form the natural heart of strategy.  thestreet.com

Crowd Sourced Data Standards?

Can data standards be crowd sourced? New York City has created a wiki that allows anyone to pitch in to the definition of its standards for open data.

Most of us know the wiki approach best through Wikipedia. The Wikipedia format successfully distinguishes between the current state of an article and its history – and any controversy surrounding the contents. People who want an answer refer to the main article, while people who have something to add or change are given the tools to do just that.

Wikipedia works (to the extent that it does) because the people who get involved are knowledgeable and generous. They want to share what they have learned. Sometimes they want to assert a particular interpretation, but most of the time a balanced view wins out. Can we expect the same kind of consensus and quality to emerge from a data standards wiki?

I would like to hope so, because nobody wants to deny the wisdom of the crowd. It's just that I'm not sure what a data standards crowd looks like. Will people with the right kind of knowledge and motivations find the NYC wiki and participate? What kind of reward will they get for improving a definition, or for fighting for or against a specific proposal?

In the realm of Wikipedia, participation is its own reward. I fear that this won't be true in the case of crowdsourced data standards. I'd like to be wrong.

Meanwhile, I notice that the first definition in the reference glossary for the project is for “Agency”. Except it's also a definition for “agency”... The capitalized word has a different meaning from the uncapitalized one. This isn't a very reassuring start.

Black Boxes

Value for Data Standards in Government

Support for data standardization in government is building strongly, with standards based on the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) now going through Congress. There are large benefits in sight for the use of standards in health and human services – through fraud reduction. "I think some of the fraud that happens in this country is based on the presumption that systems don't talk to one another," says Massachusetts CIO Craig Burlingame.

According to Noelle Knell in Government Technology, "an opening statement for the Ways and Means Subcommittee hearing on Thursday, April 19, explains that an early goal of the data standardization effort was to curb the high cost of these improper payments, which peaked at $125 billion in 2010."

What percentage of fraud (ie improper payments) can be put down to a lack of data standardization? I'd make a guess that it's 100 per cent.

I say this because all fraud involves a mismatch between two or more facts that is unseen by the granting authority. If you buy the Brooklyn Bridge from someone without checking whether they have title to the property, then you are the victim of fraud. But you're also a dope.

Common data standards drive interoperability. Interoperability eradicates fraud. Simple.

Government Technology

Information Without Standards

"Every firm, indeed virtually every division and trading desk, has developed piecemeal approaches to the recording of financial information. Regulators can indeed ask for data dumps, for multi-Gigabyte files that contain all exposures. But even when regulators have the requested information they can do nothing with it. Information without uniform data standards is simply not accessible." - Professor Alistair Milne, Loughborough University School of Business and Economics, UK.

Let's be frank: information without standards isn't information - it's noise.

Data Standards for Financial Services

Standards Psychology

The email attachment standard (or MIME type, to give it its proper name) is twenty years old. Co-inventor Nathaniel Borenstein lists his Myers-Briggs profile on his website because he believes it gives an insight into how standards workers are made.

He says: “The reason I put the profile there is that it's an unusual profile for a technical person,' he smiles. In fact, he thinks it helps to explain why he helped create worldwide attachment compatibility. 'I took another test that placed me on a scale between extremely dominant and extremely submissive. I was dead centre. And this is a very good position to have for someone who works in standardisation. In standards work, you have to be good at effecting compromise. You have to have a feel for people, and what would please them, but you also have to be willing to be definite, or assertive.

Our achievement wasn't figuring out one way of sending an attachment. It was getting 100 other email geeks to agree on the same way of doing it.'”  My experience is that it takes all sorts. Most people tend to adjust their work styles based on the people around them. It's important that people who work in standards care about standards, so it's better they be self-selecting than appointed. The trick is to expose enough people to the benefits of standards so they realize they have an interest in helping build them.  Email Attachment

On the Button

There's now a Green Button for energy data access to join the Blue Button for healthcare data. I wouldn't have hit on “button” as a generic term for data standards – but if it's working, I'll buy it.

Go To Gov20

Meet the Brick

Soon, everything that's produced - and some consumers - will have a standard identifier. The standard is called the GS1 Global Product Classification, and its base level is known as a brick. Common Identifier

Standards News from the London Market

Updates on Electronic Claims and Standardization in London.

Download ECF news Apr12PUB

Download LMG News Apr12PUB

 

Open Data Standards???

I'm all for open standards, I'm all for data standards. I'm not so sure about the Open Data Standards initiative.

I see what they're trying to do. Set up in Finland in 2011, the Open Data Standards Association is a not-for-profit foundation whose “goal is to ease the practical exchange of information assets on the internet for any commercial or non-commercial use and independent of a target audience”.

The Association is publishing a hierarchy of definitions. I stumbled into the collection at “bungee jumping”, which I was surprised to see defined as a type of place rather than an activity. This is to do with the role it plays in a hierarchy of places differentiated by usage.

My concern is that by being “independent of a target audience”, the Open Data Standards will not serve any particular community. There is undoubtedly an audience for data standards around, say, types of publicly usable building structures, but I would say that this audience should be driving such standards.  Open Standards