Gregory Maciag

Default to Open

I want to echo the headline to an article at GCN, a media outlet for government IT: “Government performance data: Let's make it open, machine-readable and permanent.”

In the past, people tended to think of data as a private resource which might – in certain, well-defined circumstances – be shared. Today, with the important caveat about security and privacy, the assumption is data should be public.

Businesses need to adopt this viewpoint as well. If you make more of your data available outside the organization, you increase the value you're giving to others while at the same time inviting them to collaborate with you. Specifically, businesses could and should be reporting many kinds of performance data in the spirit of the open data movement. I'm thinking immediately of data around environmental issues and diversity, but maybe we should be even more radical.

For example, maybe companies should issue their production data. Is it sensitive information? Does it embody competitive advantage? Well.. What if you issued your production data in a standards-based, machine-readable format, and a smart startup somewhere used the data to show you how you could save 10 per cent on your costs, or speed your time to market by a week?

You could call this open innovation. You could also think of it as a new way of operating in an era defined by information flows.   GCN

Standards Trigger Growth

When an industry embraces standards for doing business, friction is reduced and barriers melt. In our information-based world, data standards are crucial not just for the efficient functioning of complex business processes, but also for the tech-enabled innovation at the head of everyone's agenda.

And because customers apply their best experiences to every party with whom they deal, when one industry gets with the program, others get pulled in. One recent example is the powersports business. A new data standard for this industry has been created so that companies can work together to give customers the kind of experience they've come to expect with other types of vehicle. The quoted benefits include “simplified ordering processes, higher parts availability and better service technician support”.

When car dealerships began to get their systems act together, it was a novelty – but not for long. Today's novelty is tomorrow's business-as-usual. The “new normal” sets a new bar for companies which most likely see themselves as existing in an entirely different space... Until their customers tell them otherwise.

The great thing is, the powersports folks may think all they're doing is catching up, and recalibrating their market positioning. But they're doing so much more. They're going to sell more stuff, and more services. They're going to create better relationships with their customers. Their value chains are going to have so much more potential. By implementing industry data standards, they're saying yes to growth.    MPN

Standards Encapsulate Expertise

Bob Iati, Senior Director of Capital Markets at Dun & Bradstreet, writes a clear and compelling blog post on why data standards are the answer to the regulatory burden in capital markets. It's a real “seeing the wood for the trees” piece.

In a nutshell, the financial industry spends so much money on meeting regulatory requirements that it can't pursue innovation. If they use relevant industry data standards such as the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) they can save time and money, and up their game.

That's the business case. But accepting the case, and putting it into action, demands a shift in perspective. Participants in the industry have to recognize their business is contracts; that contracts are made up of standard features; and these features can be codified. It's about getting people to see the difference between the values inserted in a contract, which are unique to the occasion, and the slots the values occupy, which are eternal.

It sounds crazy, but it might have been easier for the financial industry to transition to a more data-centric environment if it had experienced a more forms-intensive evolutionary stage. The insurance industry has been adept at formalizing – and designing forms for – recurring types of contract. In other industries, and in the more esoteric insurance deals, whenever someone reuses a piece of boilerplate text to construct a contract, they're doing the same kind of thing as filling in a form – in logical terms. But it's a practice that looks very different to form filling, and less amenable to automation. You've got to know what to cut and paste.

Standards take repeated expressions of expertise and bake them into business processes. This speeds up the business, reduces the scope for error, and frees experts to work on more novel and creative tasks.    Data Management Review

Space Data Disharmony

It's hard to find a truly greenfield site when it comes to data processing. Layers of legacy systems and integration projects lead to highly complex environments that are unfriendly toward data management. But I'm surprised to learn how one domain you might think free of legacy complexity is just as plagued as any other: Space warfare.

The Air Force, the National Reconnaissance Office and other space-centric intelligence agencies are working together in a program called the Joint Inter-agency Combined Space Operations Center (JICSPOC). It seems these organizations have never shared information before, so they've got all the problems you associate with disparate data.

You know how the focus in all kinds of industries is on real-time business? Here's John McNellis, deputy assistant Defense Secretary for space, strategic and intelligence systems: “when we have something go wrong on a satellite today the assumption is, we have an anomaly. And everybody is going to gather together and we are going to study this for a while, and then we’ll make a decision about what to do. While there’s urgency, we’re going to work it to death. That doesn’t work so well when things happen a lot faster.”

That doesn't sound like anyone's idea of effective space warfare. It's more like playing chess through the mail.  I guess business organizations have an advantage over intelligence agencies. Businesses compete, but they must also collaborate – in order to create, service, and grow the very means of competition. They have to manage the ambiguities around trust in a competitive environment. They also must learn to trust and share across value chains, while attempting to protect their own interests. Intelligence agencies, by contrast, have been closed organizations – and many of them are so far from being open to sharing that they actually deny their own existence.

Introducing data standards in this situation is an obvious technical solution. The barriers around adoption will all be to do with culture. These cultural barriers make some of the local difficulties we have in business look trivial.    Breaking Defense