If you've worked in standards development for any time, you've likely seen skirmishes as well as major battles. Some prove to be worthy fights, while some have proven to be an absolute waste of everyone's time. Few produce absolute, bright-line resolution, but many do influence the directions of all parties - often for the better. Some are civil, while some involve behavior that we probably wouldn't want our children to emulate. However, this post isn't a rant about manners.
I'd be curious about what others who have worked in the area of business language and messaging standards would consider the most unruly standards battle of the past decade? "WS-*" web services versus ebXML? OAGIS vs. UBL? UN/CEFACT CCTS vs. ASC X12 CICA? While "REST" isn't so much a standard or specification, some of the "WS-*" web services vs REST debates have approached the same decibal levels. Even the "un-standards body," Microformats community, has had a bitter debate or two within its ranks.
While avoiding acrimony is desirable, the level of rancor within a discussion isn't by itself an indicator of progress or a lack of it. You can certainly find examples of individuals and organizations who were opposite sides of some of the aforementioned battles who have found enough common ground to be working actively and constructively on standards projects today. Really, this is the very essences of standards making -- going from the divergent to the common -- so those who have managed to reconcile differences to work with former competitors truly are the unsung heroes within their standards-making communities.
Time is money and neither are flowing towards the support of information technology standards nearly to the same degree as in the heady days of 1999, when I founded the HR-XML Consortium. While avoiding unproductive and wasteful debates is critical, it occurs to me that the only thing more detrimental to HR standards (or any legitimate effort to develop industry specifications with a broad cross-section of input), is for there not to be a battle of ideas at all, but rather a battle for control, which takes place behind closed doors.
I hope you will return to this new forum on HR standards. I will be sharing my work on HR services interoperability here and I hope many of you will join me in hopefully gentle (and sometimes not-so-gentle) conversations and deliberations advancing HR services interoperability.
