Comments on: Unstable Standards, Please!

By: Ajit Jaokar

Ajit Jaokar — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:20:18 +0000

Tore
Some good ideas here and already covered in some comments ..
I think the interesting concept is
— There is a growing awareness in the LET standards community that we are not good at dispensing some of our earlier, less strong ideas, i.e., putting some of our standards into the bin.
This needs two cultural changes – firstly the recognition that the ideas we put forard at the outset may change and secondly a built in mechanism to manage and handle that change. rgds Ajit

By: Martin Sutinen

Martin Sutinen — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:32:13 +0000

Tore: very good points. I completely agree that there are aspects of interoperability that could be considered more important than technical interoperability. However, do you mean that this should hold in all instances, or should the focus on different aspects of interoperability be determined to some extent on the maturity of the technical standards in any specific area?
If standards catalogues are not beneficial, what alternative guidance for actually achieving interoperability on the technical level would you find a solution? Or would the issue sort itself out naturally as standards emerge?

By: Stacy Baird

Stacy Baird — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:11:20 +0000

Tore: Very interesting post. Thank you. I am interested in your research with Paul Hollings on standards catalogs. To clean up a popular phrase, I think standards catalogs are overrated. Although your re-purposing them (or more accurately, demonstration of utility) is an interesting proposition with regard to the ‘way we do standards.’ Although I would want to to know the data is refined, as some governments merely adopt the catalogs of other countries, even if the fit is questionable. BTW, I direct you to an article I wrote, The Role of Government and the Interoperability Ecosystem (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1482752) which discusses at length the need for, and issues associated with, government focus on semantic, organizational, cultural, political and legal interoperability. These are most often far more vexing than the technical challenges to eGovernment.

By: Mattias Ganslandt

Mattias Ganslandt — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:56:52 +0000

Tore: You are highlighting an interesting tension between dynamic evolution standardization. This is a classical conflict, should the priority be static efficiency (competition based on existing and maturew technologies) or dynamic efficiency (innovation and development of new services). I agree that it is difficult to believe that governments in Europe and elsewhere could productively do more that providing a supporting framework for development. Picking specific standards is most likely too difficult and could easily hinder rather than help dynamic evolution. /Mattias

By: Niklas Lindblom

Niklas Lindblom — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:51:31 +0000

Tore,
It seems you are describing a rather non-dynamic environment. In emerging domains I believe it is vital that decision makers and policy setters try to be a bit nimble in being able to quickly adapt to new technology and discard inefficient solutions. Given, this is important in more established domains as well in order to not fall behind the developments of others. But you describe an inertia for reinvention which seriously could affect long term evolution of eGovernment initiatives so I have to ask, in your opinion how much can this ‘state of mind’ slow down the overall e-service implementation?
Also, your suggestion that standards boards focus on interoperability have many similarities to the recommendations in the draft EIF 2.0 (the leaked unofficial version, but nevertheless) while it is mentioned (in the official draft) that a limited number of standards and specifications is to be strived for. To what extent do you feel that your views are shared among EU policy makers?

By: Steve Mutkoski

Steve Mutkoski — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:29:36 +0000

Tore-This is some very insightful commentary and someting that I have heard from a few of the “subject matter experts” in various other domains besides LET who have examined standards catalogs. If you see in my post here at Talk Standards, I pointed out that there is a least one domain (what I call “interconnection”) where it seems like many countries have come to the same conclusions about the list of standards that should be used and there seems to be (at the moment) relatively little controversy about them. But this is only one domain of many that I have seen discussed.I wonder though if the many other domains are more like your field of LET (where it sounds like imposing standards is a misguided policy) or interconnection (where the list approach doesn’t so much “impose” standards as reflect what consensus seems to be at a relatively mature point in the development of the technology? I have my own suspicions, but I think that is a key question and wonder what your thoughts are on that?