Standards
I just returned from the National Immunization Conference in Kansas City, MO. Great BBQ and steaks! However, what I learned most was the affirmation of the idea that standards make the world go around. While speaking to a large group of highly qualified immunization professionals, including doctors, nurses, and highly educated pubic health professionals it hit me like a ton of bricks, they don’t understand what standards are, or what they do for us as information technology professionals.
I was asked why developing a new vaccine ordering system was so difficult, when in this day and age we can go across the globe and use our ATM cards and get money from our banks, why can’t we develop an interoperable immunization ordering system. My response was that the banking groups got together decades ago and agree to standard business practices and communication standards. During this process each organization was willing to compromise on certain proprietary business processes for the greater good.
In my current reading of Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat”, he discusses “10 Forces that Flattened the World”, of these ten forces one that hit home to me was “Work Flow Software”. The discussion of this topic came around to “standards on top of standards” and the two quotes that hit the spot were:
I was asked why developing a new vaccine ordering system was so difficult, when in this day and age we can go across the globe and use our ATM cards and get money from our banks, why can’t we develop an interoperable immunization ordering system. My response was that the banking groups got together decades ago and agree to standard business practices and communication standards. During this process each organization was willing to compromise on certain proprietary business processes for the greater good.
In my current reading of Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat”, he discusses “10 Forces that Flattened the World”, of these ten forces one that hit home to me was “Work Flow Software”. The discussion of this topic came around to “standards on top of standards” and the two quotes that hit the spot were:
This illustrates the how we can use ATM’s around the world, the banking community stopped worrying about whose business model was best and focused on interoperability between systems. What a great lesson to learn. If every organization would remember that the work is more important than the process and accept the use of standards and design their systems within the framework of those standards, things would move much faster and efficiently.“Once a standard takes hold, people start to focus on the quality of what they are doing as opposed to how they are doing it. In other words, once everyone could connect with everyone else, they got busy on the real value add, which was coming up with the most useful and nifty software applications to enhance collaboration, innovation, and creativity.”
And:
“…software companies stopped competing over who got to control the fire hydrant nozzles and focused on who could make better hoses and fire trucks to pump more water.”
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