The Inovis Blog

When I first got involved with EDI way back in 1990, I found myself thrust into the world of standards mainly because I was too new to know any better. I was pointed at a program that was being used to maintain standards and asked by the shuddering manager to fix it (the manager maintaining a safe distance from the code). Frankly, I thought his disdain toward the EDI standards was odd particularly since our stock and trade at the time was EDI translation software (still a big component of our business). I can recall times when I would utter the word “standards” in meetings and people would run, screaming, from the room. From those humble beginnings I’ve become the de facto “standards guru” around here (though I prefer to think of myself as a programmer rather than a guru…but maybe that’s a different post).

After all, standards are what makes EDI work. They were forged to bring some sort of order to what had previously been chaos. As I’ve said before, sure, EDI isn’t perfect, but the standards make it possible for people to get up and running much faster than if they had to negotiate every single byte of every single record layout of every single data set. So I was a little surprised when, a few years ago, people were touting the benefits of XML by indicating, among other things, that one could do anything with it. True enough. XML is just a syntax. You can use it to structure data, to provide identification, to provide markup (similar to HTML, for example). The tags and data elements and attributes are up to the designer. The sky’s the limit.

I remember checking out one of the new online XML document definition repositories at that time and noticing that out of just over a hundred documents, about 80% of them were invoices…and they were all different. Woo-hoo! Everybody and their brother (or sister or uncle or cousin) invented their own that probably matched their application back end. So, if you were trading with all those organizations, you would have had to create 80+ completely different documents. (How many times do you want to reinvent the wheel?)

These days, I get the impression that a lot of those individual designs have been ignored in favor of more standardized XML designs from various types of standards organizations such as X12, UN/CEFACT, OASIS, ebXML and others. Yes, there are multiple standards that seemingly do the same things but I look at them as tools much the same way as there are different kinds of hammers or socket wrenches, used for different jobs and, yes, there is overlap.

Having said that, I still encounter people who break into cold sweats and shake convulsively at the mention of standards (though I don’t get as many running from the room—I think those people just never came back). So, I’d like to pose some questions:

Do you find standards a boon or a bane?
If standards are the bane of your existence, what about them gives you so much difficulty?
If you could change something about EDI or XML standards (a given standard, or more generally), what would it be?

Okay, I’ll admit they are not the most exciting reading (don’t bother waiting for the movie version), but having them makes a lot of the other B2B work easier. Taking a little time to actually understand them is helpful, too.