John, (01)
That has certainly been my experience with financial industry standards.
A good example is the ISO standard for the securities data model. This
was originally going to be the ISO 19312 standard but the material has
now been included in the ISO 20022 financial messaging standard. (02)
The participants were mostly business subject matter experts. However,
some of those experts were used to looking at data in a real time market
data feed, so that the value of a variable was as of "now", while other
experts were from the back office, where they dealt with the terms that
are set up for a security for all time. For most terms this would not
cause a problem, for example a price would be real time or end of day,
while the issue date of a security always remains the same. However, for
things like floating rate notes, where a bond pays interest that is
pegged to some underlying interest rate, these two views of the world
result in quite different terms. The interest rate "now" for a bond is a
value in percentage points, whereas the interest rate definition in the
bond prospectus is a formula with a term identifying the underlying
interest rate and a formula defining the bond interest in relation to
this. Without competent management of these different points of view,
the resultant model was a mixture of terms seen from these different
perspectives. Even fixed interest bond coupons were defined as having a
"next" payment date, which is meaningless for terms in a reference
database for securities. (03)
The problem, which is now widely recognised, is that ISO (for example)
has a very good process for taking stable industry standards and
mandating these as ISO standards, but has no concept of the sort of
development process that would be required to develop any kind of
technical artefact from scratch. This problem becomes apparent whenever
there is a need for a standard which takes some technical form, such as
an XML schema or a UML data model. As you rightly say, a committee is
not the way to achieve this. (04)
I could add that the industry-led standards outside of ISO, such as FIX
and FpML, also suffer from a lack of awareness of formal, requirements
driven development processes. Many of the technical folks are not much
more aware than business committee members, of the formal processes for
developing technology. Mostly the effort of implementing any formal
process (or even simply having a formal, separate requirements
statement) is seen as being too much for a group of volunteers to
absorb. This despite the fact that the risks of failure are an order of
magnitude higher for a message standard that will be used in multiple
applications, than the risks of failure of one application, which
normally would follow some formal development process. (05)
If these groups were to define some requirements-level structure for
what is to go in XML messages (for example), this would take the form of
a technology-neutral, independently reviewable statement of the business
terms and semantics required for the messages they would then design. In
other words, an ontology. Instead we have technical, message-driven
development which, whether it is right or wrong, cannot be reviewed and
validated by business and often cannot be updated for new business
requirements other than by the original designer of that particular
piece. Over time, these standards become internally incoherent as
different people add their own pieces. (06)
This is before one even looks at the issues of testing and validation
that you mention. If there was even a simple requirements catalog
(rather than an ontology) it would be relatively trivial to identify
which of the intended components of a message standard had had any
exposure to reality. This would add very little to the volunteer time
that is required, and would save a lot of that same time in the long run. (07)
So committees are not the only wrong way of going about industry
standards development. (08)
Mike (09)
John F. Sowa wrote:
> Azamat,
>
> I have some concerns about such pronouncements, which sound good
> on the surface:
>
> > I hold with Ravi that it is a great undertaking. Though to
> > become such, the initiative needs deliberate planning...
> >
> > the Forum has time to debate and decide on a principal matter:
> > which general world model is most fitting to science, arts,
> > technology, commerce and industry, to conclude if "Standard
> > Ontology: a single malt or blended".
>
> The standards that have proved to be the most valuable in practice
> have been based on successful technologies that many independent
> groups have adopted, used, developed, and extended on major
> applications. In most cases, those standards started with a
> successful implementation (e.g., SQL or HTML), polished up the
> rough edges, made it more systematic, and added new features.
>
> About 20 years ago, some people working on standards got the idea
> that it would be good for the standards organizations to take a
> "proactive" stance in developing and promoting cleaner, more
> elegant systems that take advantage of the latest theories and
> practices. But the results have been decidedly "mixed".
>
> I once thought that "proactive standards" seemed promising,
> but after observing many attempts, I have very serious doubts.
> Among the problems with proactive standards is that they are
> inevitably designed by committees. The basic strength *and*
> weakness of a committee is the diversity of people with
> different backgrounds, views, and requirements. That gives
> them great strength in *evaluating* proposals from many
> different points of view. But it also means that committees
> inevitably have "too many cooks" who "spoil the broth" when
> they try to do the design.
>
> I don't believe that any proposed system should be adopted as
> a standard until *after* there has been a considerable amount
> of experience in using and testing it on a wide range of
> practical applications. Instead of "deliberate planning",
> we need extensive testing, comparison, and evaluation of
> proposed alternatives on major applications.
>
> John
>
>
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Mike Bennett
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