Gregory Maciag

Infostandards.org

Lots of websites have a bar across the top saying something like this: Home | About | Products | Services | Contact. I'm excited to find a brand new resource with the following navigation:

“Home | Find a standard | Discuss | Learn | Consultations”

This is infostandards.org, a site set up by the British health and social care community. And it's full of standards – standards people can use right now. It's great to see different agencies collaborating like this, and reinforcing the message that standards are key to creating better care. There's plenty of talk about collaboration in standards, but here's the proof.  Infostandars     NHS Website

GIGO is NO-GO

There have been two similar stories about the misrecording of data in hospitals in Australia and England. It’s a coincidence, and it doesn’t mean hospitals are worse than other organizations at recording accurate data. Health systems are under intense scrutiny around the world, so mistakes like this tend to come out.                                       

How many businesses are knowingly falsifying data in order to meet targets? Just as worrying, how many business are unknowingly fouling up their data because they have no data standards?

The world runs on information. That information had better be right. Decisions depend on it. Sometimes lives depend on it.

We need two levels of basic governance for data. The first is data standards; that is, agreed meanings and formats for the entities of interest to the business. The second is data quality standards. This is more about practice than structures. Business leaders need to impress on people that getting the data right is critical to the performance of the organization. And those who set KPIs and incentive targets need to audit for data accuracy, and impose sanctions for people who try to falsify corporate information. Knowingly entering incorrect data is akin to fraud. Don’t stand for it.  Perth Now

Guardian

Open Data Standards - Anti-climax

The UK government had big plans for open data. After lots of activity, they appear to have come up with a pretty underwhelming plan: They'll use UTF-8 as a coding standard, and (wait for it) “there should be a single method of describing data items across government”.

This is the somewhat bitter analysis of Computer Weekly's Mark Ballard. His colorful report includes chewy lines like this: “Britain's legendary bureaucratic machine consumed the coalition government's open standards policy like a boa constrictor would consume a child: one languorous gulp at a time.” And damning conclusions like this: “Other governments and public authorities around the world have opted for open formats without such a fruitless and prolonged rigmarole. The Cabinet Office has effectively given up on software standards. It has been cowed by the industry forces it puffed itself up to oppose.”

Strong stuff. The details in Ballard's article will create a strong sense of deja vu in anyone who has tried to promote the adoption of standards in a complex organization that lacks a real vision about information. What's missing here is a strong articulation of why government needs to make its data open.

I think there are at least two approaches to this issue. The first is that taxpayers have a right to inspect and critique the activities of the government. The second is that open data is a potential source of valuable information and driver of innovation. Both of these beliefs need to be present, and held with conviction and urgency.

Computer Weekly

Every Implementation Makes the Case

What is the business case for standards? It's every implementation of standards. It's the project that used an existing standard to cut weeks off its development schedule, and years off its maintenance commitments.

It's the connection you made with a customer who wanted to trade with you electronically – using the same procedures they were using with their other partners. It's the product you shipped on time because you didn't have to invent the tooling. It's the profit you made by being able to analyze data fast and accurately, so you could make the right decision at the right time. The business case for standards isn't some abstract formula. It's countless instances of recurring, solid benefits.

 

Value of Business Data

One of the great quests of our time is to put a value on business data. This has to be one of the worst ways anyone can spend their time.

Here's why. Any item of data has value because it answers a question. Data that doesn't answer a question in not data, it's noise. If you can run your business without answering any questions, then your data has no value, and you are very lucky. Otherwise, you could say that the value of your data is equal to the value of your business. Looking for any valuation in between these extremes is pointless.

Let Them Justify the Status Quo!

Some of the biggest costs in healthcare occur in the supply chain. The Affordable Healthcare Act makes it even more important that standards are used to make hospital supply chains more efficient.

According to Brent Johnson of Intermountain Healthcare: “We’re making good progress. A few years ago, we couldn’t even decide on a standard. Now, at least we know what the standard is and we’ve just got to get over the top. But that’s problematic. The problem is, it takes effort. You have to have resources to be able to change or clean up your database.”

Curt Miller at Amerinet GPO agrees: “The reality is it takes time and money. We can decide on a standard. But in most cases, whether you are a provider or supplier, moving to that standard is a significant effort.

First there’s changing your item numbers within your item master in a provider. Well, that item master ties over to your accounting codes and in many cases it ties to your revenue cycle systems as well. And those may require modification in order to make the change work. On the supplier side, it involves changing many of systems – distribution systems, and the relationships with all their partners. I’m not aware of many hospitals or suppliers who have those kinds of resources just waiting for projects. So, teeing it up, timing it correctly and then having the resources available are the key.”

I'm sure you can see how these quotes apply to all kinds of sectors as well as healthcare. It's good to see the resourcing issue aired so clearly. Change does take effort. The effort needed is the investment you need to make for the efficiency savings.

However, I want to see a shift in emphasis. It's time people were asked to make the case for sticking with the old, broken, slow, plagued-with-redundancies, hard-to-maintain, inflexible, inaccessible and incompatible ways of doing things.

Why is it always that we're asked to justify the resources needed to fix our processes so we can save money, be more agile, grow the business and serve our customers better?

Also, I want to point out that the remedial work needed to retro-fit or wrap any systems landscape for a common data standard is a one-time project. You can create a team to perform the necessary steps and then disband it. A third party will be happy to do the work for you, probably using tools and methods they've used elsewhere. And if you don’t embrace standards and do the necessary remedial work, you’re committing to carry unnecessary labor in the organization – in perpetuity.   COUPA

We Are You

Mary Shaw of IDEA, the standards body for the electrical industry, shares a useful deck of slides from an e-business presentation. It's a different industry than mine, but her core messages about standards bodies ring true. Answering the question “Who are we?” she says:

“We are you. We represent you, we are the voice of the industry […] We don't believe 'it's someone else's problem to solve'. We are a family, an industry family [and] we want you to be part of the family too.”    IDEA

Healthcare Data Standards

A 2004 introduction to healthcare data standards is available as part of the book Patient Safety: Achieving a New Standard for Care, which you can read online or download as a PDF. The relevant chapter is number 4, which starts, at page 127, like this:

“Data standards are the principal informatics component necessary for information flow through the national health information infrastructure. With common standards, clinical and patient safety systems can share an integrated information infrastructure whereby data are collected and reused for multiple purposes to meet more efficiently the broad scope of data collection and reporting requirements. Common data standards also support effective assimilation of new knowledge into decision support tools, such as an alert of a new drug contraindication, and refinements to the care process.”

This would serve as a template for a description of the role of data standards in any sector. Change the healthcare-specific terms to equivalents in your own domain, and you have the base case for standards.

Healthcare standards have moved on since 2004, but the role of standards remains the same. But how many handbooks on the key topics in other industries feature standards in such a prominent way? If you know of any, let me know.

Meanwhile, the web serves to keep people informed about data standards on a day-to-day basis. Take a look at CommonDataHub (CDH), “the global repository for commonly used data standards such as ISO codes and industry code sets. CDH consolidates data sets from multiple sources, provides additional attributes in some cases, and maps related code sets to provide a complete picture of a subject area”. 

National Academies

Common Data Hub

SERENDIPITY

Writing about standards for open data, Matthew McClellan neatly sums up the three biggest benefits to be had from standards. He calls the first one “scale”, by which he means speed of development, reduced costs and saved labor. The second is “integration” – the ability to share data inside and across organizations.

It's his third benefit that makes me sit up. He calls it “serendipity”: “Open data and open standards invite public servants and private citizens alike to build novel applications on top of government data, leading to unforeseen insights.”

This message is at the heart of the open data movement – but it's strangely muted in the business world. Why is this? Is it because the idea of gaining insight from standardized, shared, and aggregated data has been colonized by promoters of big data and analytics? Maybe the use of these technical-sounding terms – and their association with vendors and consultants – is inhibiting people in organizations from championing data-based discovery. If so, that's more than a shame.

We beat ourselves up about our track record with innovation, when potential sources for new ideas, processes, products and services lay buried in our data. The tools are out there. The data is accessible. With standards, the data is meaningful. Commerce needs to take a leaf from the open data community's book – these guys are looking more creative and more entrepreneurial than the traditional technology shops in many industry sectors.

And don't you love McClellan's use of the word “invite” in that quote? Standards are begging us to raise our game.         Data Smart

Short Term Thinking Costs Long Term

There’s an illuminating slip of the tongue in this response by Eric Ly, co-founder of LinkedIn, to a question about legacy systems: “Data is good when it’s well linked and you can build upon it, enriching the information around identities over time. There seems to be a view in the events industry that when you look at technology, you’re only considering the next upcoming event that you’re planning.

After the event and before the next one, there is an opportunity to switch vendors if you didn’t like its performance. However, you’ve just made the data issue worse because the information you have doesn’t correlate. The lack of data standards for these tools exasperates this issue.”

You could swap out “event” for “product” and have a good description of the short-sighted error many businesses have traditionally made. “New product = new system” is the kind of thinking that has created the legacy problems we tackle every day.

I like Ly’s use of “exasperates” though he probably meant “exacerbates”. “Exasperates” gets across the needless frustration caused by short-term decisions that ignore data usability and cause recurring problems down the line. Lack of data standards certainly exacerbates the data problem – and it exasperates business leaders.  TECCSOCIETY

Technology is Power: Standards Power Technology

Technology keeps changing. What remains stable? Business data.

Business keeps changing. What remains stable? Business data.

Change keeps changing. What remains stable? Business data.

When you follow standards, you are adopting a pattern derived from the knowledge, experience, and goals of the community. Standards are the tried and true articulation of business data. Whatever changes, this won't.