"Another standard bearer for the insurance industry is fading away: the paper bill." So runs the trail to Robert Regis Hyle's excellent piece about billing systems in Property Casualty 360. This sentence isn't in the main article as far as I can see, so it's likely to disappear once the site's Technology landing page is refreshed. I wanted to capture it and preserve the sentence for eternity, because it contains hidden depths.
First, I know "standard bearer" is being used here in the sense of "familiar feature", and is trading on the idea of a flag-carrier leading a batallion into battle. But there's a literal meaning too. Printed papers are standard bearers because they bear - carry - standards. When you generate a bill, you lay out financial and addressing information in a format that has family resemblances to the way everyone else produces bills. And of course you produce all your own bills to the same format (or you try to).
Now, unpeel the paper from the bill and what you're left with is data, contextualised by a standard. You can now attach the data to a different "bearer". Digital technology allows you to send and receive data through a multiplicity of channels. The standards you use for these communications takes the place of the organizational discipline imposed by the old paper bearer.
Second, I think "fading away" exactly captures how traditional technologies and business processes yield to improved versions over time. There's nothing inherently wrong with paper, it's just that non-paper bearers are better - they're faster, cheaper, more reliable, more secure, and more flexible. Paper is fading away because there's a better alternative.
Now, I don't think paper will ever completely disappear from our lives. It's always going to be a handy, power-free, portable information bearer. But it has no role in modern business communications. Consumers get this. They opt for ebilling because it's more convenient than receiving paper bills in the mail. Electronic bills tend to get paid electronically too. In the business-to-business realm, the paper bill is a dead letter.
The challenge for businesses is not so much the move away from paper, which, after all, has been heralded for as long as I can remember. It's to understand the crucial value of standards when the standard bearers dematerialize. No executive would ever think that the ease or otherwise of processing bills was just a technical matter: they'd rightly regard this as a business process to be optimized. So, with the paper disappearing, decision makers have to avoid the trap of thinking that data standards are a technical issue. We all need to ensure that as one technology gives way to another, we preserve and leverage the communications structures and protocols that we rely on to do business.
Electronic Billing Systems