Some people think standards are imposed on organizations from the outside. The reality is that the need for standards emerges naturally as business areas become more complex. Standards form the answer to a question that will always arise in any domain where people need to share information.

A current example is the project to bring standards to Linked Data.  Because Linked Data is loosely defined, this “has led to an environment where interoperability suffers. That’s because people are left to solve the same problems, such as those around publishing and retrieving data, over and over again, and they take different paths to get there”.  It could be one of these paths is the optimal path, and everybody should be using it. Or it could be everybody needs to get together and develop a new path. The important thing is they recognize they have the same problem.

“Interoperability” is shorthand for “being able to work with each other”. The need to work with other individuals and organizations isn't an external requirement, something that comes out of nowhere. It's an essential aspect of every business.  Get Formal WIth Linked Data

Insurers in Pakistan are bringing life insurance to new markets via “branchless” financial services organizations operating by mobile phone. For example, subscribers to Zong Mobile can get 30 days' coverage between PKR 100k (about $1,000) to PKR 300k (about $3,000) for a daily premium as low as PKR 2 (one fiftieth of a cent, US). To put some context around that, according to Bloomberg http://www.bloomberg.com/slideshow/2012-08-13/highest-cheapest-gas-prices-by-country.html#slide52 the average daily income in Pakistan is $3.57. The service is delivered using just four text messages – and that's all.

The challenge in growing this market is not about technology but awareness. SMS (texting) technology is a perfect channel for life insurance sales transactions. It's not so good for sales education. There will need to be further investment in relationship management.

Another product mentioned in the review I read gives users monthly coverage based on the balance in their mobile bank accounts. This is a cool extension of an existing offering and a good way to promote money management.  I notice also that Zong Mobile is a business of China Mobile. The new mass markets for insurance are being built in Asia, and are based on mobile technology. The potential for innovation and growth is jaw-dropping.  Mobile Life Insurance

Steve Keifer wrote a thoughtful piece about the proliferation of B2B standards back in 2009. Looking back on it, one pattern seems clear to me. Standards emerge in the areas where they are needed – domains where different parties need to share data with each other. Standards converge when different parties realize they can simplify their transactional behavior.

So, over time, the standards population waxes and wanes. We saw a burst of B2B standards when industries started to connect online. We now see a shrinkage as these standards converge. But the smaller standards population that results is stronger, more resilient and more useful than the plethora it replaces.

It would be nice if everyone got right-size standards right from the start. However, we're dealing with evolution here. Industries must go through the expansion phase before they can successfully consolidate, and move forward on a strengthened, unified basis.  The Long Tail of eCommerce Standards

Standards are what we do, but “standardization” has a negative ring to it. Harmonization is better – and, as time goes by, is more accurate.

You create standards where confusion and needless complexity reign. Industries – and pockets within industries – establish standards that address their needs. Over time, these different communities begin to deal with each other, or to extend their existing communications. The next challenge becomes negotiating between standards.

Sometimes translation will work. In many cases, translation becomes institutionalized within some kind of hub, or translation facility. Sometimes one community recognizes the other community's standards will work for both. Sometimes the two communities merge and blend their standards.

The common theme in all these solutions is that ad hoc arrangements are replaced by something permanent. So, this is a kind of standardization, even if no new standards are created. Let's call it harmonization. Different voices, singing together. We don't want everybody to be the same – we want everybody to get along.   Let's hear it for harmony.

The Intersection blog at insurance-canada.ca asks for opinions on the “data first” strategy for systems modernization. Bruce F. Broussard Jr of Insurity says that the environment for data first has improved due to “several developments over the past few years (which) have changed the insurance data landscape, most notably the maturity and acceptance of industry standard ACORD data structures.”

Data first – it's got to be. Data is what this industry does. It's the raw material and the end product. It's everything in insurance. Data first and last. Insurance-Canada

There are some business situations where the data you choose to capture or control forms the absolute heart of the business. This is the realm of the secret sauce. If the recipe gets out, you're sunk.  But in many cases, the secret of the business isn't the sauce. It's what you do with the sauce. The ingredients are well known and easily found.

Insurance is the classic example. Carriers can't compete on the nature of the data they hold on risks. But they can and do compete on what they do with that data. “What they do” starts with data quality and runs through communications, analytics, product development, and service improvement.

It's not as if one insurer discovers that, say, the height of a building will be a contributory factor to its stability, and keeps the secret. That knowledge is out there. It's obvious. So – to telematics. I understand pioneers in the field wanting to protect their first mover advantage. But I don't believe the advantage lies in what telematics data is. It's what you do with it.

You and I could draw up a list of telematics data items right now. If you've ever driven a car, you can quickly come up with an exhaustive list of things you could measure related to driving. We might end up with a list that's too long, because we might want to measure quantities that electronic sensors can't (yet) determine – the mood of the driver, say. But our list definitely won't be too short. When it comes to insurance data, the secret isn't the ingredients. It's the execution.  Telematics

Wearable computing is coming back into fashion, with the growing hype around Google Glass and rumors about the iWatch. Google Glass is a kind of heads-up display – a pair of spectacles that show video, with sound delivered via bone conduction through the device's legs. The iWatch is... well, nobody knows. But very likely something that upsets the people at Pebble, the crowd-funded tech darling of the moment.

The motivation for wearables originated in the military. Fashion designers have sometimes incorporated bits of tech in their clothes too. But if you think about it, we're already wearing technology – in our pockets.

Clothes are as much, if not more, about display than practicality. It's even more so for accessories. The first wristwatch was made for Queen Elizabeth I of England. The clock display was just an excuse for a fancy bracelet - Good Queen Bess had other people worrying about the time on her behalf. These days, your headphones say something about you too.

I think we may see a different kind of personalized, technological future that's more like the scenario in Minority Report. If you remember, in that movie the environment is embedded with intelligence that recognizes and communicates with individuals. There's no need to wear your own display, because your surroundings are constantly morphing around you. Reality and augmented reality are seamless.

The first place we'll see this kind of personalized environment is in the car. I guess you could say you'll be wearing your car.  Connected Cars

I like Kristin McMahon's post about bad data. She uses lively language and the story of the three little pigs to focus attention on the importance of data management. In particular, she warns us about “feeding our real-time addiction for data consumption—with complete disregard for the accuracy, reliability, or trustworthiness of the data”.

Addicted to data – there's something in this. Have we become too attached to our vision of an always-on, always-busy world? Are we churning data just for the sake of it, hoping for miraculous discoveries to leap out at us? Have we actually given up driving the business in the belief that technology will somehow deliver the future we want, gift-wrapped on schedule?

But I don't think everybody is affected in this way. Not everyone gets addicted to data. When the first PCs and spreadsheets arrived, everyone got hooked on tabulating and graphing data. Most of us got through the novelty phase and went on to live healthy, productive lives... The same will happen with big data. At first, surfing the new waves of data will be exhilarating. But people will get used to it quickly. And then the real work will begin.

In the meantime, we need to heed McMahon's warning. However much we use data, we need to be using data that's clean, reliable and represents what we think it represents. In the discipline of data management, considerations of volume must never outweigh considerations of quality.  SAP

The industry needs telematics data standards, and fast. The main business reason given is usually about competitiveness. Drivers shouldn't be locked in to one provider at the end of a policy term, just because they can't take their data with them.

One blogger pursues this thought in more detail, and from the policy holder's point of view:  “If you are unfortunate enough to get yourself a bad driving record, then you could be tied to this provider and unable to get cover from any other provider and subject to accepting whatever policy your provider offers at whatever price they decide to set for you. That is if they even decide to insure you. You could even end up being uninsurable and unable to drive legally without ever receiving a criminal ban.”

He or she adds that standardization of telematics scoring would enable regulators to issue a rating system insurers would have to recognize. Once such a system is in place, drivers could train to improve their driving capability, using the published criteria.

These are good points. It's not just freedom to choose an insurer that's at issue here. Standards will also help to guard against customers being captured by companies running unfair practices. They can also be used to improve everybody's driving, so making the roads safer and reducing the risk profile of the business.

From a standards setting point of view, there are two issues here. One is the need for data standards. The other is the need for standard data values. So, we need a standard way of recording, say, swerves. But then we also need an agreement about what magnitude of swerve represents what level of risk element. Then companies can compete fairly, and consumers can make informed choices.

I don't know if the current situation is “the wild west”, in the words of this blogger. But it's a mess that can be avoided.  The New Wild West

A thought: Cities are often known for the industries concentrated there, or the cultural artefacts created there. Weeds may be growing in parts of Detroit, but it will always be Motor City. Vienna will always have the waltz, great cake and Freud.

In our information age, cities will also be known for their excellence or influence in information technologies – which are, I guess, the ultimate combination of industry and culture. Silicon Valley already has this reputation. Cities and regions around the world continually try to create their own “Silicon X”. There's even a “Silicon Roundabout” in London.

Here's what I'm thinking. The breakthroughs in technology over the next few years may not come from new types of device, but from ways of using ubiquitous, connected technologies. Cities that invent, host or promote tools and processes that serve this environment can gain recognition and prestige when their innovations are taken up globally.

The Babylonians gave us math. Maybe British Columbia will give the world a traffic data standard: “Open North is working towards a data standard for traffic data, such as accidents or roads closures, with Open511. In B.C., many travellers depend upon DriveBC to find out about road closures or weather conditions. The goal of Open511 is to make a traffic data standard that would be adopted by jurisdictions around the world, so your experience getting information on road conditions or closures is consistent from B.C. to Arizona.”

If the protocol that wirelessly connects your phone to your laptop can be called Bluetooth, there's no reason why we couldn't all be using DriveBC – in Australia as well as Arizona. So here's a possible new source of civic pride and regional leadership. Let's have more communities come forward to sponsor standards – to the world's benefit.  Data BC

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.

“Benjamin Franklin once wrote that nothing can be said to be certain 'except death and taxes.' If Ben were still around, he might now say: 'except death, taxes, and inconsistent federal data standards.'’

Kathleen Tighe, Chair of the Recovery Board and Inspector General at the Department of Education  notes that the issue of data standards in federal government was first raised in 1965, and revisited in 1974. “Nothing much has happened in the intervening years, however,” she says. “It’s about time to do something.”

She makes the argument that data standards “would permit data sharing among agencies, save lots of money, and vastly improve the quality of information, including details on how the government spends your money.” In its four years of existence, the need for consistent data standards is the most important thing the Recovery Board has learned. If gas stations can have standard nozzles, and diamonds are assessed by the same criteria all over the world, and even baseballs are manufactured to strict standards, government can surely do better.

Tighe's recommended starting point for data standards in government is a universal award ID for all contracts, grants and loans. This would be seem to be an essential part of government accountability. We need a campaign!   Recovery Blog

Failure to implement data standards in health care could be fatal – that's the judgment of the Harvard Business Review. Thomas C. Redman and Donald Nielsen note that computerization is delivering real benefits in health care, notably from aggregation of data. They cite a serious interaction between Paxil and Pravastin that was only discovered through analysis of newly aggregated data.

But elsewhere they see a “crisis” caused by non-use of standards. First, a lack of patient identifiers makes patient records incomplete and frustrates complete data analysis. Second, non-use of standards for health attributes can lead to poor or incorrect care.

As the authors say, “Without [standards] it is simply too easy to translate 'mild systolic flow murmur' into 'underlying cardiac disease,' 'wheeze" into 'asthma,' and mild reactions to specific drugs into allergies. These sorts of misinterpretations were all too common without computers, and electronic medical records have done nothing to reduce their severity or number.”

Every sentence of this article is highly quotable. I hope it has the impact it deserves.

Harvard Business Review

Some complexity is necessary. If you're serving an inherently complex business process, then failing to reflect this complexity in a systems design will lead to poor functioning and error. But much of the complexity we find in information systems isn't this kind of good complexity. It's complexity grown out of systems development, maintenance and integration. It's the kind of complexity that grows like topsy.

There's one kind of needless complexity that can be tackled relatively easily. This is the complexity created by failures to use relevant data standards. Generally speaking, the best way to reduce complexity of any kind is to restrict choice. This is what regulations do. For example, you don't get to be creative about which side of the road you drive on.

Standards work in a similar way. Standards reduce choice where choice is at best unnecessary, at worst downright dangerous. A data standard restricts the rights of participants to deviate from agreed norms of behavior and flows of communication.

Good standards are non-arbitrary mechanisms for restricting choice. The form of such a standard is derived from the natural characteristics of the business being served. (Which side of the road we drive on can be based on a coin toss, but the structure of an insurance policy record had better be based on insurance policies.)

Great standards go beyond good standards by exploiting choice restriction so as to enable and encourage growth and innovation. Such standards model the business they serve with a whole-industry coherence, rather than focusing only on islands of interest.

Decision theory has a concept known as bounded rationality. This is the idea that anyone's ability to make a decision is limited by the information they have, their ability to process it, and the time available. It's a major corrective to the basic idea in economics that people make optimal choices based on perfect information. I bring this up because it seems to me that an industry data standard is a map of the bounded rationality of the community that creates and exploits it. Data standards are significant artefacts which express the information capabilities of a group of participants.

So, when you deploy industry standards you anchor your organization's information activities in explicit statements of competence. By adhering to standards, you are using as much or as little complexity as is really needed to get the job done. Not too much, not too little, but just right.

Companies involved in M&A know that aligning and integrating systems is rarely a walk in the park. Robert Fox warns that alignment and integration shouldn't be a one-time deal. Standards are at the core of a successful, long-term strategy which will also make the new entity more amenable to future M&A activity.

Sand Hill

Data standards have immediate, obvious value in industries where tangible products are moved among participants. If you're building automobiles, you know you're involved in supply chains. To make those chains as efficient as possible, participants sign up for data standards that will speed the identification, logging, receiving and storage of parts and products. Standardization also brings easier quality control, safety and disposal management, among other benefits.

Despite the fashion for seeing the world in terms of networks, it's a curious fact that people in non-tangibles don't always realize they're involved in supply chains too. They don't see that the information flowing among partners is their shared endeavor. And how failing to make information flow as efficiently as possible threatens agility, quality and profitability – for everyone in the chain. This is often why standards aren't on their radar.

We can try to fix people's understanding, and get them to see how they're part of a dynamic, collaborating enterprise that crosses organizational boundaries and evolves over time. This might raise awareness, which is always a good thing, but it doesn't necessarily lead to a clamor for standards. It's management who need to get the message.

Standards continue to create benefit for businesses and consumers alike. This is partly because even if you don't conceptualize yourself as being in a value chain, anyone involved in insurance has to cooperate with others. People feel pressure from those relying on them, while putting pressure on those whose input they themselves need. So, while insurance is a non-tangible type of business, it has developed a high regard for the value of standards.

It's a different story in the financial industry. Here, although people are also closely involved in chains, there's more of a culture of independence. The packaging or securitization of debt is a prime example of how finance works to transform flows into products, so they can be traded more anonymously. This encourages people to ignore the interdependencies they are creating. And there is less of an interest in standards, because every deal is (supposedly) unique. Of course, there are exceptions when it comes to transactional business, credit cards and markets.

The good news is that the most important area for standards development, namely health, is following more in the insurance mold than the financial mold. Health professionals from different disciplines realize they are collaborating in complex chains serving the needs of the patient. They know those chains have to be both strong and slick. Standards are key to their success.

Efficiency isn't for nerds. It's for everyone. It's the basis on which we can build real value. Standards aid efficiency, and efficiency is the parent of effectiveness.

Like Standards Make Work for instance.  Lurking in the background of some resistance to standards is a reluctance to learn something new, even if it will bring benefits. This reluctance is very close to the feeling we can get when we think about changing an unhelpful habit. Yes, going to the gym will be good for me and it will be fun but you know what? Sitting here is just great too.

The rational arguments for standards always go though. No one can seriously argue with saving time and money by using standards. The logic is unassailable. And for folks who don't care for logic, the evidence of successful implementations is overwhelming.

But rational arguments don't touch our emotional reasons for sticking with what we know. Despite the fact that everyone knows we must deal with change, human beings aren't great at contemplating change. Note, I'm not saying we're bad at changing. Actually, humans are incredibly successful adapters. It's the thinking-about-it part we don't like.This uneasiness about change often gets rationalized. We look for a more intellectual basis for our gut feelings. This is where the “standards make work” claim can come in.

Basically, it goes like this. Standards may well save us time and money. But I don't have the time and money to implement standards. To embrace standards fully, I'd have to stop what I'm doing, and I can't do that.One person's discomfort about change speaks to another's fear of standing back from the day-to-day. And this is not a good hook-up.This is the heart of the problem: we're not dealing with one party's emotional intelligence, but two. We can't just keep educating the reluctant implementer. We also have to help the gatekeepers and sanction-holders. We need to turn them into advocates of standards too.

The way forward here is to encourage a small but significant shift in thinking. Standards make work?

Actually, Standards make it work.

Open Source, Open Data, Open Standards... Chris Ewing writes a post aimed at untangling the confusion surrounding these terms. I think people are reasonably well informed about what open source means. At least, they know it's about software development. However, I can see why people stumble over “open data” and “open standards”. It's because we should more correctly say “open data” and “open data standards”.

To me, “open standards” are products of a community-driven process which are available to the sponsoring community and beyond, and which are not controlled by any sectional interest. For example: ACORD Standards.  The open data movement is a great thing, and we need standards for open data. But let's not forget that we also need open standards for plain old data.  Opens

Telematics has arrived, part whatever. The Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) proposes that all new cars have EDRs – Event Data Recorders -  fitted by September 1, 2014.  That's less than 20 months away. Can we have a data standard too, please?

“Some of the EDR-recorded data that the NHTSA hopes to analyze includes things such as vehicle speed; whether or not the brake was activated before a crash; crash forces at the moment of impact; engine throttle level; deployment timing and readiness of air bags; and whether or not the vehicle occupant’s seat belt was buckled.” I know some insurers with a keen interest in this data.    Gizmag

A recent IBM blog post presents the results of an online chat session about “leveraging data in customer experience journey mapping”. Maybe it's just me, but this way of presenting opinions seems untidy and confusing. It's like eavesdropping on a bunch of people who don't really have the time to explain themselves.

This is because the post is a raw report of a Q&A session held over Twitter. So it's actually a questionnaire, with a little by-play among the people filling it in. The irony is, here are people talking about understanding the data involved in a customer journey. But the data of their journey is obscure.

Twitter encourages brevity, which is good – but it can also make people sound arrogant and/or trivial, even when they don't mean to be. Also, a list of tweets is quite hard to digest. With this kind of material, I want to see some analysis, or a summary at least.

I asked if this matters?  The feedback I recveived is the concern if it's an indication of where business analysis is headed. It makes it look like it's okay to solicit some opinions and then replay them verbatim. They think it's a step backward. I doubt it, but would we apply the same procedure to an actual customer experience analysis project? I doubt it.  The Big Data Hub

Having a disaster plan ready to go and using mobile technology and social media enabled the author’s agency to provide exceptional service to its clients when their needs were greatest. This positioned the agency to get its clients’ claims paid promptly and their repairs made on a priority basis. Carriers too excelled at keeping their agencies in the loop on claims and being “first responders” for their insureds. This makes a great story about the positive role independent agents and their carriers play for their clients in times of need, along with providing some very useful disaster planning tips for agencies and carriers alike.   Download ACT Agency Planning Sandy Becker Feb 2013

Laurence Pritchard gives an excellent overview of the issues surrounding telematics standards in Europe. The European Union is known to punish companies that take advantage of a dominant position to obstruct interoperability – as Microsoft knows to its cost. So, if the insurance industry doesn't get its act together on telematics interoperability, someone could be in the firing line.

But who? There isn't a single dominant player who could be seen to be the obstruction in this market. Without standards, consumers could be locked in. But they wouldn't be locked into just one dominant supplier.

However, Pritchard warns: “There are concerns that, if insurers do not agree data standards for telematics-based products, the competition authorities could step in and force the issue.” The EU may well legislate to enable intervention even in the absence of a single dominant player.

It's clear that telematics is the way forward for car insurance. Everyone in the industry must know there's no mileage (if you'll pardon the pun) in attempting to gain customer lock-in through proprietary technology. Even if a first mover captures a large part of the market this way, they will be rapidly overtaken by a second mover offering the benefits of better, no-lock-in telematics products. The faster the industry focuses on resolving a set of standards, the faster the market will grow.

His Opinion: Telematics providers of other insurers, which would effectively lock the policyholder in to their current insurer on renewal. These issues must be addressed if telematics ... telematics-based technology in cars is by now a familiar story, linked to the European Union Gender Directive being implemented across Europe. ... Francis Abberley ... telematics ...

Blogger Bruce Badger reckons it's time legislators stepped in to enforce data standards for the British health service. In an open letter to his MP, he says: “The money recently wasted on NHS systems was wasted because the focus was on *systems* not on data format standards. […] The NHS spectacularly (if unsurprisingly) failed to make the perfect fits-all-needs system, but they could have defined a first version of a standard interchangeable patient record, or even just how medical image data would be exchanged.”

Badger's complaint was prompted when he was given a CD of medical scans – none of which he, or his doctor, could open. He proposes that images could be encoded in a standard format such as TIFF, and an open standard developed in XML for the structured data.

I'm as surprised as Badger must have been to discover that anyone is using a proprietary standard for image data. I'm a little depressed to know that some hospital went to the time and expense of burning a disk that is of no use to anyone. But I'm cheered to see that the remedy is obvious: standards.

Britain's NHS is a public service. If legislation is needed to make it do the right and obvious thing by data standards, then so be it. I can only guess that NHS procurement people have no incentive to ensure patient data can be shared – even when they are buying solutions that produce expensive, dud takeaways for the patient.

The OpenSkills Sett

Data standards are not a one-time deal. They have to be a core part of the way you do business. There's no point in using standards to cleanse your data if the data is then going to be corrupted by inappropriate business processes, or by processes that fail to follow legitimate business rules.

This is the message I get from a blog post by Utopia's John Ferraioli. It set me thinking. Too often, ownership of and interest in process and data are thought to be separate concerns. Yet process and data are clearly intimately involved with each other. If we promote separate excellence in process and data domains, we may wind up undermining the organization's real interests.

Specifically, data standards govern the meaning of data while process models influence the usage of data. Notice how there's an inequality here: We don't speak of “process standards”. In fact, people shy away from the idea of process standards as if it's blasphemous. And yet, unless people see their business processes as standards, they risk implementing them in disparate and incommensurate ways.

If you have a defined business rule, you should be able to define standard business processes which implement and safeguard that rule. This work should align with, and may inform, your standards. This is one reason why the ACORD community is devoting more attention to business processes these days.  utopia

What is it with organizations that don't value data governance? Perhaps they're not asking the right, penetrating questions.

I like these questions, courtesy of IBM's Chris Evans: “Imagine you need to submit financial earnings such as 10Q or a 10K that needs to be filed with the SEC with a decentralized governance model. Do you know how much longer and how difficult this would be? Before these reports can be consolidated for submission, you would need to ask the simple questions about the data such as what does it mean? Does it mean the same thing for all business units or just for a few? What are the translation rules to get everything consolidated so that they can mean the same thing?”

When you use data standards, these questions evaporate. Evans is polite in referring to the “decentralized governance model” for a situation we might equally call “data anarchy”. The only way organizations get away with anarchy is by not asking these types of question.

Evans has another question:  “While companies are now becoming global companies, data needs to be more synchronized and to start, data needs standards, but at what level?” Organizations in the insurance domain have a ready answer, thanks to the investment made by the community in the ACORD standards.   IBM

Do insurance apps matter? Definitely. Travis Dearing has a quick summary of how apps can help customers and organizations. Refreshingly, Dearing points up the real benefits of apps for insurers – this isn't one of those bandwaggon articles. As well as summarizing the most popular apps, he gives some hints about future apps. In passing, he also makes a strong case for the relevance of cloud computing to the world of apps.

Insurance Apps

In September 2012, the pharmaceutical industry launched TransCelerate – an organization tasked with creating common standards for clinical trials. Two weeks later, one of the industry's big players announced it would make its clinical trials data available immediately to business partners.

With TransCelerate's standards development work only barely begun, this could look like an attempt to pre-empt the eventual standards. If you put your large collection of data out into the community, then the community has to work with what you give them. There's no need for the donating company to translate its data. If the donor's formats become the de facto standard, then it will save money in perpetuity.

However, the pharma industry is dominated by a small number of big players. These leaders are likely to have a proportionately higher say in the crafting of standards than smaller players. They are also more likely to have the resources to assign to standards creation. They will certainly own the largest part of the existing data.

To take a pragmatic view, the faster members of a sector arrange to share their data, the better. Earlier sharing means earlier benefits – to organizations and their end users. The friction generated by the use of one participant's inhouse standard may be outweighed by the benefits of sharing. Also, as time goes by, it is likely that the user community – including the original donor – will press for any changes required to make the standard more effective.

From the donor company's point of view, I guess they see the release of their data as the main benefit they are giving the sector, and any implied standards pre-emption as an additional favor. This organization has presumably invested time, money and expertise in developing its clinical trials standards. Managers there will likely see the resulting formats not as local peculiarities, but as highly professional models of the clinical trials domain.

What is important is that this community continues to support and resource its shared standards efforts. Even if this early donation dominates initial standards creation, its influence will wane as development continues. Essentially, those inhouse resources previously invested in maintaining and developing an inhouse standard will become available to the wider community. The donating company will also begin to alter its own formats and practices in line with shared developments. In other words, everyone will evolve together.

Can the not-invented-here syndrome be beaten? If these unilaterally published standards are good standards, then they should be embraced and extended by the community. If not, not.  Seeking Alpha