I concluded my last post, by saying that the vision for HRInterop is to "open up" (community participation), "lock-down" (lock-down IP for confidence and clarity among implementers and contributors), reduce costs, and improve standards quality and utility.

Opening Up

I've related in previous posts, that it is a sign of success that HR-XML now has more non-member implementers than members. As adoption increases, it is logical to expect there will be more total implementation experience outside of HR-XML than inside. In the course of the 3.0 project, it is fair to say that half or more of the feedback we received was from outside stakeholders.

New content, new channels of participation, and a new structure for managing intellectual property are changes that will support engagement of a broader community. HRInterop.org forums are a place where anyone can bring implementation questions and feedback. There is no cost to participate, but this does require registration and agreement with a feedback policy and community guidelines.

The Return of the Customer

With new channels of participation and new content we also believe we will see a return of HR services customers within the dialog shaping standards.

In its early years, HR-XML enjoyed participation from HR IT representatives at organizations such as Northrup Grumman, Shell, BP, and HP. We even attracted significant support from those working on a next generation HR system at U.S. Department of Defense. Unfortunately, we didn't produce specifications directly addressing the problems of this segment. So it isn't surprising that we weren't able to sustain engagement with these stakeholders.

How to Change

They say "a change we'll do you good." That "the only thing that is inevitable is change." We know change brings opportunities and challenges and that change is hard. In Part 1 of this series, I wrote about the importance for standards organizations to have a maturity plan in the same fashion that a maturing commercial product would have such a plan. In Part 2, I provided some background on HR-XML's origin and its early years. In this post, I take a look at some of the events that led to the HR-XML 3.0 project.

Tool Troubles

In business and in life in general, someone can tell you exactly what you need to know, when you need to know it, but the information doesn't always get acted upon immediately. I mentioned that in our very early days, Microsoft had helped raise our profile by allowing us to participate in the BizTalk launch. The very gentleman who had been so helpful back in 1999, visited us at our April 2004 New York meeting and gave us a review of our then 2-year-old version 2.* library. Let's just say this was delivered in the blunt manner characteristic of engineers. He covered items such as the complexity of the xsd:includes (see my Part 2 of this series), the use of troublesome schema features (e.g., the way we had used xsd:union within the date types throughout the library) as emphasizing that interoperability required a solid data model - not just XML. He concluded his presentation by saying something to the effect that we could fix these deficiencies or just become another group that travels, eats a lot of "hotel chicken," and shares a few beers together after work group meetings. The presentation did trigger a lot of discussion, but not necessarily any particular next step.

This is the second in a series of posts examining where HR interoperability standards have been and where they are headed. In the first post, I explained that it is as important for a standards organization to have a maturity plan as it is for any company with a maturing commercial product. In this post, I cover some of the "looking back" part, by giving some background on the origins of HR standards and their development through the years. If you are not a history buff, you can jump straight to the point.

Prior Work: 1999

My background (my first career?) was in new product development for information publishers, including BNA and Thomson. I focused on the HR market and gained experience with XML's precursor, something called SGML. With the publication of the XML 1.0 specification in Feb. 1998, I began to put together a few drafts of a markup language for HR. By the spring and summer of 1999, I had begun working with a loosely organized online community on a markup language for job postings and resumes. An archive (.zip) of this prior work is still available still available from the Cover Pages. Some of this prior work also was mentioned in Futurize Your Enterprise, a web strategy book published that year. If you bother cracking the archive to look at the DTD, you'll see that even before the Consortium was started, this work was offered as freely distributable and provided for anyone to use for any purpose.

At the recent HR-XML Partnering and Integration Summit I was asked about the timing for the release of HR-XML 4.0. To clarify, version 4.0 would be the "next, next-generation" of HR interoperability standards. Version 3.0 is just about to make its debut as a candidate release. My answer was that implementers do not yet have a good reason to even pencil-in a version 4.0 release within their product pipelines nor was it yet time for implementers to be planning for specific design changes beyond those communicated within version 3.0.

While I'm not sure it was exactly understood, my follow-up comment was that while 4.0 simply isn't a matter for any individual implementer to focus on today, that it was absolutely imperative for the Consortium -- as an independent, vendor-neutral organization representing the collective interests of standards stakeholders -- to be sketching out, planning, and communicating a maturity model beyond version 3.0. My basic point is that there are requirements for ensuring the continued availability of quality business language standards for HR services that will go beyond short-term interests of individual companies -- particularly those that have already invested in a current generation of specifications.