Here's some good advice on how to keep focused when driving out data standards – while continuing to serve business-as-usual. It comes, as so often these days, from healthcare. Dave Reed at Cook Medical says you need to remember why you're rolling out standards. My reading of his detailed advice is that you should stick to the big, compelling benefits, and remind everyone of their value.
His first reminder is the value of standards to patients. Patient safety absolutely relies on data standards: “Data standards give us the assurance that expired or recalled products will never make it to a patient’s bedside. It sounds like a simple enough goal, but the existing processes don’t allow for it. Using GTIN and GLN numbers, suppliers and providers can track and trace products all the way from a manufacturers warehouse to a patient’s bedside.”
There's a version of this need in every business domain. For example, a financial services company can get into real problems if it sells a version of a product that no longer meets regulatory requirements – or a version that should not yet be released. Without standards for version and effective dates, such mistakes can happen easily, and cause significant business impact.
Dave's second group of reminders are all around operational efficiency, both inside an organization and across the value chain. It can be tempting to see operational efficiency as a nerdy obsession – something that's good, but a bit dull and not worth getting too exercised over. For this reason, I think it can be useful to change your vocabulary when talking about efficiency. You have more impact if you use language like waste, delay, loss, expense, confusion, stress, rework, remediation, and write-offs.
We understand “patient safety” at a visceral level because the phrase summons up a plethora of negative images. We put ourselves in the patient's place and we imagine what could go wrong. This motivates us to act. It's different with “operational efficiency”, which sounds like an abstract concept affecting nobody. So I make no apology for recommending the use of a little fear-inflected language. Inefficiency can kill patients. And inefficiency can kill businesses – and entire industries. Standards save lives.
Returning people's attention to the big reasons why you're rolling out standards will keep the program on track, while simultaneously reinforcing a culture where not using standards is regarded as pragmatically, professionally, and morally unacceptable. Cook Medical
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