Gregory Maciag

Positioning the Business Case for Standards

The good people in the clinical data standards world recently updated their business case for standards: “One key message, re-emphasized from the previous Gartner business case, is that the use of CDISC standards at project initiation can save 70 - 90% of time and resources spent prior to first patient enrolled and approximately 75% of the non-patient participation time during the Study Conduct and Analysis stages.”   There is also “a safety reporting study citing a time savings from 34 minutes to less than a minute to report an adverse event”.

We can all identify with these examples because we know that in the clinical setting, time is of the essence. Standards tend to get a good hearing across healthcare because healthcare professionals are very process aware. The complexity and fragmentation of their environment is more likely to impede leverage of standards than any intellectual failure to see the benefits.

The value of this kind of business case is not in the comparison of investment and return. The value lies in bringing to life the tangible benefits on the ground. These benefits are speeding up processes, reducing errors, and saving lives.

If you're obligated to call part of your advocacy for standards a “business case” then I'd advise following the example of the clinicians. Highlight the tangible benefits that everyone will immediately recognize. Stick close to the core drivers of the profession you're addressing. Keep your audience's minds in the workplace. Make your case concrete, not abstract. Highlight good, real examples rather than general principles.  streetinsider

Shifting the Epicenter

I came across this snippet in a piece by EMC's John Heck: “Line-of-business (LOB) executives are fast becoming IT decision makers. According to IDC, 'by 2016, 80% of new IT investments will directly involve LOB executives, with LOBs taking the lead decision-maker role in half or more of those investments. The agility of the LOB will dramatically shift the epicenter of the IT buyer.'”

The change in location of IT investment decisions is being driven by new technologies like cloud and social media. The implication of IT decision making shifting into the business frontline is that enterprise architects may lose leverage over standardization. They know the value.  So it's also important that the value of standards be communicated to the business, not just IT.    EMC SPARK

Two words to explain the importance of data standards

Over in the mortgage sector, Andy Crisenbery sums up the critical nature of data standards in two words: integrated and disclosures.

Behind the two words lies one force: Regulation. Regulators don't just ask for more information presented in different ways. They also compel organizations to change their business processes. New disclosure requirements are prompting system rewrites – and data standards are the only way to achieve reconfiguration. The industry is being forced to be more collaborative – and only data standards can deliver collaboration in a cost-effective, timely, and agile manner.

Tony Garritano puts it like this: “Lenders increasingly prefer standard, open interfaces that allow for quicker implementations and faster time to market over proprietary interfaces that require customized expertise or lock them into a particular vendor. Data interoperability is a challenge because the mortgage workflow involves multiple participants, each with its own specific systems. To achieve a more efficient and fully compliant process, these disparate systems must work together to pass data back and forth in order to allow for tighter collaboration and communication. This need has become all the more critical with the forthcoming transition to the new integrated disclosures in August of 2015.”

This situation resonates in many business sectors. It's a connected world – and connectivity needs standards.   eLynx   Importance of Data Standards

The Myth of the Enforcer

Guides to adopting and exploiting data standards usually include a simple statement about “enforcing” the standards. I never see any detail about what enforcement really means.

On one level, it's obvious that if you're going to use standards then, well, you need to make sure they get used. But too many people have discovered the sad truth that publishing or mandating the use of a standard does not mean it will be used. An organization can be enthusiastic, neutral or indifferent to the benefits of standards – but none of these attitudes has a reliable correlation with standards usage.

When we say “enforce” standards, are we advising organizations to design sanctions against people who ignore the chosen standards? Are we imagining a role of enforcer – who swoops down on developers, integrators, app stores, vendors...? Neither approach is realistic. So I have to conclude that advice about enforcing standards is empty.

In my experience, people “get” standards on two levels. There's the intellectual level, which is in fact pretty superficial. This is the “business case for standards” – ie you'll save money and time, be more agile, be faster to market, reduce dependency on obscure skills and knowledge, be more open to partnering, be more customer centric. That's an easy sell.

The harder sell is the gut level, which comes down to: “Why should I do something different?” And the best response to this question is: “Because everyone else is doing it.” The second best response is: “Because people and organizations you admire are doing it.” (The worst response, by the way, is “because I say so”.)

The best enforcer of standards is peer pressure. This makes sense, because standards are a collaborative asset. They exist to protect, support, and enable the group. Peer enforcement is powerful but somewhat covert. There are mysterious tipping points where resistance flips to acceptance, and these points differ from time to time and place to place. Sometimes it's a slight change in team membership – other times it's exposure to another organization. It can even be a moment of enlightenment at an ACORD event.

Let's let go of the myth of the enforcer. Change doesn't work like that. We need to nurture the professional consciousness of informational professionals, so that doing the right thing comes naturally – from inside the group.

Gordon Stewart Passed Away Today - Good Friend... Here is a Vintage Video

 

From Philipstown.info

Gordon Stewart, Our Founder, Is Gone

November 26, 2014

Started website and weekly paper

By Kevin E. Foley

 

 

Gordon Stewart conducting a rehearsal in 2013

Gordon Stewart, a man who made an outsized contribution to the life of the Philipstown community, died in the early hours of Thanksgiving Eve. Devoted husband to wife Zanne Early Stewart and doting father to daughter Katy, Stewart was 75.

Locally Stewart was founder and publisher of Philipstown.info and the weekly print edition The Paper. He was also a volunteer firefighter, theater company founder, supporter of the arts and a conductor of music.

We were in the midst of editing our front-page story on the upcoming performance of the Messiah, which he was planning to once again conduct, when word of his passing came from Zanne.

Knowing we will have to remake page 1 of the paper is something the man who made this enterprise possible would love to hear.   LINK

Does it have to take a crisis?

The IMF (International Monetary Fund), which lends to sovereign states, established its Special Data Dissemination Standard (SDDS) in 1996. Then “in 2012, the SDDS Plus was created as an upper tier of the IMF's Data Standards Initiatives to help address data gaps identified during the global financial crisis”.

This is not to say the IMF didn't develop its standards in the intervening period. In fact the organization introduced major new standards to make it easier for emerging markets, with less well developed statistical capabilities, to participate.

I take two points from this brief history. One force for change in standards is crisis. When the business system fails, new questions are asked. In this case, the questions included: Who are the counterparties to the risks in the global financial market? Unable to answer this kind of question, participants realized they had data deficiencies that needed to be rectified. (Note that no amount of analytics could have answered this question.)

The other force for change evident in this history is inclusion. As an organization's business evolves, so its constituencies and stakeholders change. It finds itself working with parties whose interests and capabilities are not addressed in the original standards. The standards' community has changed, and the standards must change accordingly.

I won't be the first to suggest complacency on the part of the global financial community in not collecting the data which proved so important to the crash. But we all know it's easy to put off dealing with a future eventuality – especially one that combines big penalties with low probability. In the insurance industry, we have the advantage of a professional culture that thrives on confronting and taming new kinds of risk. As the disciplines of data management advance, and become better recognized in the upper reaches of organizations, people who have worked on and with ACORD standards have a great deal of insight and experience to offer other business sectors.  IMF

Standards for a Smart World

ACORD's job is to make information move. We began by facilitating communications between agents and brokers. ACORD Forms continue to be the basic communications currency of the insurance industry. The data standards we have developed for the global insurance community ensure data moves between teams, customers, and business partners with total retention of meaning and credibility.

It used to be that data was created and consumed only by people. Even as computer systems began to talk with each other, they were doing so in a limited fashion. Such communications served fairly discrete steps in business processes which were otherwise clearly human in nature and execution.

We are witnessing a shift. The falling cost of sensors, storage, and communications, means that data  is being produced by more and more devices. This data is consumed by other systems which may act on it. So, for example, your smart thermostat might sample temperature and send data to a system that controls the heating.

The world around us is becoming truly automated as invisible streams of data issue from our phones, tablets, appliances, and cars. The built environment is listening and reacting to those streams.

The implication for the standards profession is profound. Data standards are usually catch-up exercises. Needless diversity in data standards proliferates, costs of doing business rise as a consequence, and then people get together to create a common standard for the common good. In sectors with mature standards organizations, such as insurance, we can get ahead of the curve and craft data standards before proliferation gets a hold.

But who is going to pick up the standards challenge underlying the smart world? Standards are barely mentioned in forecasts of technological impact on business and society, and when they are, it's in the form of a general need, not any suggestion of who ought to be responsible for standards.

Where should we look for leadership on this issue? I believe a good place to start is with standards adopters in business and industry. These are the people who can best articulate – and demonstrate – the value of data standards. They have the experience and the business cases to substantiate their advice. Their task is to educate consumers to choose standards-based solutions and service providers who collaborate on standards.

We're on the edge of a great opportunity to save time, money, and pain. We can shift into a dramatically more informed and enabled world without going through a wasteful period of unnecessary complexity. Let products and services compete on their true value to customers, not on format lockout. It'll be better for everybody.

Take Responsibility for Data Flow

The message that data standards are a business issue rather than a technology one is making great progress in industry and commerce. However, not everyone has heard it. In the UK, an IT industry group is calling for common data standards in the police and criminal justice system: “Industry body TechUK said important data exists within too many IT systems that are neither connected nor searchable. As a result, within same police force and between closely connected services, it is often difficult to link people, objects, locations and events data. At the regional and national level, the situation is even worse, it claimed.”

I'm struck that it's fallen to the technologists to air this issue and bring it to public attention. We all expect our law enforcement agencies to be focused on using data effectively. The need for data standards should not need to be pointed out. It's their business.

A few days after TechUK's intervention, we learned that Britain has lost track of a number of foreign criminals who were let out of jail but not deported. Why would that be? Well: “Teams set up to manage foreign offenders still use old technology, with referrals from the Prison Service being sent to the Home Office by fax and manually entered into the records system.” Many people reading this blog might need to look up “fax” on Wikipedia.

On the positive side, pockets of poor practice like this one now look bizarre and isolated. It's not like the process owners can shrug and say everyone else is in the same position. There's no place to hide. If you own a process, you're responsible for data flow.

theguardian

ITPRO

Data Standards for Cities

The ISO (International Organization for Standardization – yes, really: I'll explain below) has issued a standard for open city data. The standard includes items like “percentage of city population served by wastewater collection” and “green area per 100,000 population”.

Good international standards do more than rule on technical formats for data sharing. They also express consensus on the important variables in the domains they address. Here the ISO and its relevant committees are articulating the qualities that count in city management – the factors which are important to citizens. The standard is then a tool for driving metrics.

A quick note on how “ISO” can stand for “International Organization for Standardization”. Obviously, it doesn't. In fact, “ISO” is itself a standard! The organization itself has three official languages: English, French, and Russian. Rather than pick the acronym from one of the languages, they decided on a shortened version of the Greek word isos, which means equal. That's kind of cool.

Open Data Standards

ISO

Health Industry Needs Standards

“If the [health] industry can't get its act together, it's time for the feds to step in and insist on uniform data standards, before poor interoperability contributes to a major health incident, such as the outbreak of an infectious disease.”      Information Week

Accounting Data Standards

An interesting exchange about accountants and technology. Responding to a comment on an article, a contributor says: “So in reality what we actually have is a plethora of fairly mediocre products all claiming goodness know what benefits over their competitors, yet unwilling to deliver the fundamentals of universal data standards. In the past the concept ‘sticky’ used to be called ‘lock-in’ and was largely frowned upon as an abuse of the client. Why therefore has this idea suddenly re-surfaced and gained more traction in preference to ‘open systems’?”

“Sticky” is a marketing term that's pretty innocuous in its original setting, which is websites. You make your site sticky so that people will keep exploring it and keep coming back. When the same concept is applied to business applications, it starts to look offensive.

In insurance, we've learned that proprietary systems are less effective than ones using industry standards. This is partly due to the inherently collaborative nature of the industry. I think resistance to data standards in some other professions may be traced to an absence of collaborative pressures. However, regulators often exert an equivalent influence. Accountants won't be able to deny their clients data portability and connectivity forever.

And as the commenter says: “Just how many times do we need to reinvent the wheel – after all, data associated with accounting has remained broadly static for many years.”   accountingweb

Standards for Everyday Healthcare

Fitness data from wearable devices needs standardization. Jim Harris reports that the healthcare industry isn't ready to take this message on board. They're focused on creating EHRs (Electronic Health Records) from doctor visits.

I think the spread of wearable devices and, soon, implantable and digestible devices, along with increases in remote medical consultations, will mean that device-generated data will quickly outstrip doctor-collected data. This is a good thing, because it means physicians will be able to spend less time collecting data and more time listening to and treating their patients.

The EHR is similar to the customer, product or account file in a business. Focusing on the EHR goes along with treating healthcare as an old-style industrial process, where the patient moves along a conveyor belt in a health factory (aka hospital). The reality of healthcare today and tomorrow is much more distributed, dynamic, and informed. The accent is on prevention and intervention. We want to keep people out of hospital.

So, while there's no question we need to have usable, standardized EHRs, we also need to pay attention to data standards in the domain of medical devices and apps.   Fitness Data

Standards Create Opportunities

Historically, industry data standards have come into existence as the result of evolved complexity among communicating systems. Organizations build systems in isolation, then when they want their systems to talk to each other, they have to build bridges. Eventually there are so many complicated connections that the participants decide to standardize their data so they can save time and money. This also allows them to change their business practices more easily as well as making themselves available to a larger number of relationships.

That's history. Looking forward, the existence of industry data standards provides a foundation for new tools and services. Once a standard is in place, an important element of business infrastructure is available for new uses. This is why the web, for example, has been so successful.

A neat example of this pattern in action is Cube Cities: “Using open data standards and browser-based virtual globes, Cube Cities develops applications that present building information vertically.” This is a great idea.  In a small piece of irony that isn't the fault of the Cube Cities folks, their building views currently only work on Windows machines and Macs, because of limitations with the Google Earth Plug-in.

The moral of the story is that standards create opportunities – and limited standards limit those opportunities.  Cube Cities

Positioning the Business Case for Standards

The good people in the clinical data standards world recently updated their business case for standards: “One key message, re-emphasized from the previous Gartner business case, is that the use of CDISC standards at project initiation can save 70 - 90% of time and resources spent prior to first patient enrolled and approximately 75% of the non-patient participation time during the Study Conduct and Analysis stages.”

There is also “a safety reporting study citing a time savings from 34 minutes to less than a minute to report an adverse event”.  We can all identify with these examples because we know that in the clinical setting, time is of the essence. Standards tend to get a good hearing across healthcare because healthcare professionals are very process aware. The complexity and fragmentation of their environment is more likely to impede leverage of standards than any intellectual failure to see the benefits.

The value of this kind of business case is not in the comparison of investment and return. The value lies in bringing to life the tangible benefits on the ground. These benefits are speeding up processes, reducing errors, and saving lives.

If you're obligated to call part of your advocacy for standards a “business case” then I'd advise following the example of the clinicians. Highlight the tangible benefits that everyone will immediately recognize. Stick close to the core drivers of the profession you're addressing. Keep your audience's minds in the workplace. Make your case concrete, not abstract. Highlight good, real examples rather than general principles.    Street Insider

Technology Onslaught

A recent SMA report summarized at Insurance Canada highlights nine technologies set to have a big impact on insurance:  3D Printing, Internet of Things (IoT),  Drones/Aerial Imagery, Driverless Vehicles, Wearable Devices, Gamification, Artificial Intelligence, Semantic Technologies,Biotechnology.

The five items in bold are predicted to reach 30% penetration within three years. “The ranges of impacts for an insurer are extensive. Some of the technologies offer finer granularity in underwriting (IoT, e.g.). Others provide vehicles to assist in risk /claims tracking (e.g., drones, wearables). Some define new, different risk elements themselves (e.g. driverless cars).”Any one of these impacts would be substantial in its own right. If they're all coming at us at once, can we cope? We can – with standards. Without standards – forget it.

By the way, Cognizant have a good paper out on drones and insurance. The pictures in the report testify to the fact that these unmanned vehicles are available in all shapes and sizes. They're coming soon to an insurance product line near you.

Insurance Canada

Cognizant

 

Facing the Future

Kathy Birkett writes an article about facial recognition technology and its significance for insurers. As far as I can tell, she hasn't got any facts about insurance companies investigating this area – she just says a couple times that insurance companies are “very interested” in current research and then speculates.

The idea is that how your face looks could indicate how fast you age. I guess there a million caveats around this. We can't know whether or not a computer program will ever be able to reliably predict your lifespan from a photo. But it's possible that this research could isolate some key health indicators. It's well known that a physician can tell a lot about your health just by looking at your face. So I don't think this development is necessarily as spooky as it sounds. If this kind of data analysis can help to improve diagnostics, then it has a role to play.  Senior Care Corner

Global Standards - Internet of Things

Gartner puts the Internet of Things (IoT) at the top of its current hype cycle analysis. It's worth remembering that being at the crest of the wave doesn't mean a technology is useless or fake, only that expectations are outstripping current reality. At some point, need and capability will coincide, and that's the sweet spot.

Interestingly, the main reason why IoT expectations are ahead of delivery is lack of standards: “A wide number of consortiums, standards bodies, associations and government/region policies around the globe are tackling the standards issues. Ironically, with so many entities each working on their own interests, we expect the lack of standards to remain a problem over the next three to five years,” says Gartner's Hung LeHong.

Locating the correct place for custodianship and direction of standards in this area is far from easy. IoT potentially affects every walk of life, every usage situation, every technology, everybody. But like any seemingly insurmountable problem, we've got to break it down. Technical standards should be handled by organizations like ISO, ITU, W3C. Business standards should, I believe, be led by industries.

But there's a big caveat here. Although industry bodies should lead the development of business standards, they should also accept (and embrace) fuzziness at the edges of their competences. By building from the core out – and recognizing they are doing so – they can then work together in areas of common interest.

The insurance industry has a good record of doing this. We take full responsibility for core entities and processes, but we cooperate with neighboring business domains – because our industry covers (in every sense) every other industry.   Gartner

Real Need for Standards

Hard to believe this is #6 in a list of the fifteen smartest things heard at this year's Technology Tools for Today [T3] Conference in Miami, an event for financial advisors:

“During one panel, an advisor asked [event co-founder Joel] Bruckenstein, when will there be data standardization in the industry? Bruckenstein answered: 'When hell freezes over.'”  I guess it's the question that's the smart part.

And for the record, when began my career at ACORD I heard the same answer from a panel of CEO's. I suppose they were not thinking much about computers needing to exchange data in those days.   Financial Planning

The Penny Drops

I see people are beginning to realize the DATA Act will have ripple effects right through government. Look at the scope of the data standard: “They [the Office of Management and Budget] must come up with a set of common data elements for financial information that will cover just about everything the government spends money on and every entity it pays”.

Once those entities have been defined, they will be used by all kinds of organizations not just in providing data for partners and citizens, but also in running their internal processes. Also, once you have entities to which financial attributes and relationships are attached, you also have the core set of substantive business entities covering the whole of government business. It's the heart of a data standard for all activities.   FCW

ACORD Implementation Forum

 

Innovate at the Speed of Life

A great slogan from Sanjay Gupta, Senior Vice President at Allstate, presenting on the company's use of technology to engage with customers. He cited Allstate's Drivewise program, which tracks the user’s driving data and rewards them with discounts when they’re doing well; and the Fuelcaster app, which lets drivers know the forecast of gas prices so they can choose when to buy. And of course they have a mobile claims app which includes the ability to attach pictures, as well as a great sounding app to help parents monitor the driving of their learner teens.

Allstate is really getting into the lifestyles of its customers. The leading insurers are being more creative than ever before and using data to grow the business, deepen relationships, and make the world a safer place.  IBM

A Different Kind of Data Standard

David Megginson reports on his success with creating a data standard for organizations responding to humanitarian crises, like Syria or ebola. David has quickly established a community standard which is light-touch and inclusive. HXL (pronounced HEX-el) works with the lowest common denominator data format in general use – spreadsheets. Rather than forcing attribute names, it uses common hashtags alongside existing names.

This is a great approach and I can see how it would help agencies work together, direct resources, and plan interventions. However, I hope it's not the only way forward for this important domain. It sounds absurd to call humanitarian responders an industry or sector, but that's because it's relatively new. Globalization is rewiring the world commercially, but it is also rewriting our approach to international events and contingencies. Terrorism and diseases in once “obscure” parts of the world are now everybody's business. And so, as we develop our responses to humanitarian issues, we will necessarily evolve processes and practices to improve our performance.

Perhaps HXL will evolve into the core data standard of this young sector. As people get used to the hashtags, they might just stop using their local equivalents.   Quoderat

Focus on the Customer

Sasa Brcerevic, COO at Hiscox London Markets, gave an inspiring and well-argued keynote at ITC 2014. Sasha B, as everyone calls him, commented that outsiders see the London Market as a black box. These outsiders – that is, customers – look at the market as a single entity. We therefore ought to think of the London Market as a $50bn insurance business. And, as a business of this size and significance, the market should be focusing on the customer instead of looking inside itself.

Sasha mentioned some once-great big businesses that failed to pay attention to the customer, including Kodak and Nokia. These are good examples: Leading players who pretty much invented the markets they dominated, but then lost them to competitors with better understanding of customers' evolving needs and desires. Sasha calls it “a loss of focus on the value being brought to the customer”.

Sasha's advice is sound, and that it applies to every insurance market, and to the global insurance market. In a big global company, you remove unnecessary internal differences so you can accentuate your key external difference – the novel value you bring to the marketplace. The industry must think the same way. Industry standards form the main tools for removing waste, improving agility, and containing costs. When we collaborate as an industry, we compete better – collectively and individually.

Personalized Premiums

I sympathize with homeowners in Florida who wake up to notices from FEMA telling them their flood insurance premiums are going up. When your dues rise from $400 to $485 a month, that's a serious chunk of change.  But you can't blame the new flood risk maps, which are the basis of the new charges. The maps are based on real data and solid algorithms.

As we get better informed, our world comes into sharper focus. We're able to be more and more accurate about issues like flood zones. Inevitably, this means there are more boundaries as populations are segmented ever more finely. You're more likely to find a neighbor paying a higher or lower charge.

We're going to see much more of this with the spread of personalization based on standardized data. You already have a pretty good idea that the kid with the souped up car with dark windows is paying higher premiums than the sedate sedan driver. But what if you find out your neighbor is paying less for his insurance because he brakes a fraction of a second earlier than you do? All right, you're not going to trash his yard, but it's another symptom of how better data will make “fairness” more granular.   Florida Today