The STAR eXchange

“STAR is moving forward-STAR is not done!” – that was the main message that was resonating from the STAR Members that were in attendance at the Feb 11th 2010 STAR Meeting.  The comments shared from the STAR Members in attendance at the meeting is a testament to STAR that its members believe in STAR, have seen its value, have experienced the benefits and have realized that STAR is Technology Dedicated to Business Efficiency!  Hearing these comments from the membership community is  a strong show of the value, benefits, effectiveness and work of the STAR Organization!  The STAR Members showed their unwavering support, dedication and participation of the STAR Organization despite the struggles that many of them have faced in the past year.  There are many new and improved projects that were discussed at the meeting – as they say…’our work here is never done!’

The STAR Steering Committee made it clear that STAR has strong goals & projects set for the next couple of years.  The STAR Steering Committee conducted an Open Discussion Forum and shared ideas and asked questions of the members.  This sparked great comments, ideas, discussions from the Members!  The STAR Members spoke…and the STAR Steering Committee listened intently…

Stayed tuned…its going to be a great year for STAR and its Member Community!

STAR is pleased to announce that the Feb 11th 2010 STAR General Session Keynote Speaker will be Chuck Allen, Integration Architect at SilkRoad Technologies, Inc and founder of HR-XML Consortium.

Chuck Scahill, current STAR Development Chair and VP of Business Development from Karmak, Inc stated, “I think it will be an excellent presentation.  It is both timely and consistent with our experiences, particularly this past year.”

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Keynote Presentation:  “Standards 2010: Prospects and Challenges for Standards Development in the Next Decade”

Abstract:

As standards organizations enter the 2010s, they face very different circumstances than a decade a ago. At the dawn of the “2000s,” analysts warned us that a key risk was the creation of a “tower of babel” as industry standards groups proliferated nearly as fast as dot.com start-ups. By the end of the decade, some groups had achieved measurable interoperability gains, but at the cost of years of upfront committee time followed by implementation and revision cycles also spanning years. Today, standards organizations that have managed to survive the decade’s two boom and bust cyles face vastly different funding circumstances and participation levels. At the same time, standards organizations are challenged by an accelerating pace of technology and marketplace change.

In this session, Chuck Allen, founder of the HR-XML Consortium and an adviser to other standards initiatives, will offer a survey of the state of standards development, including key challenges and new approaches. Among topics to be reviewed are:

Development methodologies. The committee processes driving most standards development organizations (SDOs) have remained largely unchanged over the past decade (STAR standards being an important exception). Most SDOs take months or years to spec out a standard with meaningful development against the specification beginning only after publication. While standards organizations have been slow to adapt their methodologies, in the same period, many enterprises have significantly transformed their internal development processes through the adoption of a range of agile methodologies. While there is growing recognition of the need to update standards development process, the prospect of applying agile methodologies to standards development tends to be met with equal degrees of interest and trepidation.

Intellectual property. Most standards organizations manage intellectual property by requiring participants to grant royalty-free licenses to the SDO and to anyone implementing the standard. For companies with large patent portfolios, this can impose a burden of expensive patent inventory searches and monitoring. Since each SDO has slightly different licensing terms, current licensing practices also prove challenging for an implementer wanting to apply multiple standards as well as for standards development organizations trying to converge standards. Patent non-assertion policies and efforts to simplify and standardize licenses hold some promise is reigning in the complexity associated with managing IP.

Funding models. Standards cost money to develop and maintain. However, traditional funding approaches, such as pay-to-play” and “pay-for-the-standard” don’t always keep up with funding needs and can work as disincentives for adoption and engagement.  There isn’t an easy answer to the question of financial sustainability for many SDOs, particularly in these tight economic times. The answer likely lies in a combination of approaches, including doing more with less, the design of attractive sponsorships, meeting and programming fees, and taking advantage of grant opportunities.

About the Speaker:

Chuck Allen, Integration Architect at SilkRoad technologies, Inc., was the founder and Executive Director of the HR-XML Consortium, Inc. Prior to founding HR-XML in Dec. 1999, Allen worked in a variety of new product development roles for major business publishers, including Thomson (now Thomson-Reuters) and the Bureau of National Affairs. Allen has a B.A. from the University of Virginia.

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Event Date: Thurs., Feb 11th 2010

Host Details: STAR Organization

Meeting Registration Information: The STAR February 2010 General Session is available only to STAR Members and approved Guests. If you are a non-member and wish to attend, please email Ghezal Khalili, STAR Executive Coordinator at gkhalili@starstandard.org .  If you are a STAR Member, please register at this link: STAR Member Meeting Registration Link

A blog from Vishal Vasu, “Open Source vs Open Standards“, has some interesting points on how the two terms get confused. His points about open standards are on target:

The word “Standards” means a set of guidelines to which a lot of people have agreed upon. Putting this definition in the context of software, “standards” allow a company to pick and choose from competing vendors and interoperate their systems without being pinned down to one of them.

He’s correct with this statement, the goal of a standard is to promote interoperability amongst vendor implementations. So that a user can pick and choose from vendors that compete, but doesn’t lock the user into one of them. Vendors should compete on the value added features they provide the users, not the proprietary nature of the data. Custom extensions to a standard are no-longer a standard, they are proprietary.

In the STAR community this means that customers must require and demand that STAR standards be used in the products they purchase and use. This allows them a greater choice in moving from one vendor to another. Vendors that work with multiple trading partners need to require that STAR be used, and if requirements are not there, work with STAR to get additional changes to the standard made.

However, Vishal, goes on to say:

I feel we should have more specific and beneficial standards that are not vendor specific or not vendor dictated because ultimately it is the interoperability that counts at the end of the day. If open source software fits your environment and gets the work done in terms of costs, features, support or maintenance – all’s well. But if you are putting security, compliance, performance, upgrades and scalability before everything else then proprietary software designed with open standards in mind is your choice. We can even extend this further and run a combination of both – it’s our choice.

Interoperability again is the key here, but the statement on proprietary systems being more secure, compliant, better performing, upgradable, and scalable is not accurate. There are many open source implementations of standards and in general software that is much more secure, performs better, upgradable, scalable and is more compliant to a standard than many proprietary systems. Like any software product out there, this varies by product to product, whether it is open source or proprietary. More and more proprietary software is leveraging open source to help create it.

In general though, interoperability are what standards are about. Customers need to require this interoperability within the products they use or purchase. If a software system does not allow the export and import of their data into an open standard format, they are locking themselves into that vendors product for the long haul. They are limiting their own ability to control the data that belongs to them.

An interesting quote from Bob Sutor’s most recent blog entry.

….understanding of the value of [sic] and a preference for truly open standards must be both part of the policy of and inherent in the common practices of an IT organization. Technologists and IT administrators must live, breathe, think and reason in terms of open standards. They should feel repelled by dictated or faux-open specifications that were developed without balanced community involvement and innovation.

Read more about his views on Open Standards at his blog.

When we asked users to submit testimonials describing the value that they have derived from STAR standards, we were not exactly sure what type of responses we would get, if any. It has been my experience that so many companies, believing the myth that there are competitive advantages in data formats, prefer to keep their implementation of STAR standards close to the vest – even their successes. This is a myth that, even after 9 years, STAR is still trying to debunk.

Myths aside, I have been pleasantly surprised with the responses that we have received thus far. We have received testimonials from various retail system providers including IPS , PBS Systems, and RouteOne. We have also received our first OEM testimonial from Ford Motor Credit Company, and even a testimonial from the Motorcycle Industry Council (MIC) whose members implement STAR.

The benefits noted in the responses vary with some focusing on the overall benefits of STAR including, as MIC puts it, “an opportunity for substantial cost savings when building and supporting data communications throughout the value chain”. While others, such as IPS, focus on the percentages of increased efficiencies and reuse. According to the IPS, testimonial there was a “50-60 % time savings” and code and data reuse of “80% or higher” through the use of STAR standards.

While I am incredibly grateful for ALL forms of testimonials, I must admit that I am a sucker for numbers. When an implementer tells me that STAR standards have saved them close to 60% in time savings and upwards of 80% in code and data reuse….well my heart goes all a twitter. There is a certain sense of a job well done that comes from knowing that STAR standards really do provide value to the community, and in this current economic “climate” (ahhh… think of the trade winds of the Hawaiian islands) showing value is paramount. And really, that gets back to the original purpose of these testimonials.

As an architect of the standard, it is not part of my job to actually implement what I have created. I design and code the standard based on member input and then, with the membership’s blessing, send it off into the world to create value. So to a certain extent I work in, dare I say …, a vacuum? I know it sounds awful but it is reality. I will not know the true value of what I have created until I receive feedback from implementers, i.e., testimonials.

So the next time you are able to reuse code, or you saved yourself time because you are implementing a STAR standard, think of me…and think of the STAR community….then go directly to STAR and submit a testimonial!