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.
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