STAR Standards Chief Architect David Carver recently wrote a post about the W3C's use of a public issue tracker. A few people have "retweeted" the post and sent it my way via email. In the post, David gives kudos to the W3C for providing a publicly accessible issue tracker. I think the reason the post has some resonance is that at least a few readers recognize that the post is not so much about the use of about a particular feedback technology as it is about behavioral change within standards organizations and new ways of working. Actually, "new ways of working" isn't quite the right description. Between the lines, I think the post really is about bringing well-established and contemporary software development best practices to the work of standards organizations. If you read through David's other posts regarding the application of agile methodologies to standards development, they very much fit into this same theme.

David writes:

Unfortunately not all the [standards organization] workgroups take advantage of [issue tracking]. There are a handful of organizations, STAR being one, that make use of issue tracking systems to track the work and when it was completed. Visibility either to the public or at least to their membership can be key for helping adopters know what is coming and when it might be coming. Having the visibility into their process is a good thing, and should be encouraged.

I have enough experience with issue trackers in my years with HR-XML to be able to offer a few suggestions to standards organizations and other industry working groups:

The rise of the API as a means to deliver services and other business capabilties from the Internet isn't a new development. However, it is a safe prediction for 2009 that the number and variety of APIs for accessing business services will continue to proliferate. In theory, industry standards should benefit as more service providers look for proven models to put up new APIs. You'd also imagine that customers would be demanding adherence to industry standards in the hope that standards would be of help should customers want to get their data back from "the cloud" (see Vinnie Mirchandani's related advice for customers as they move into the cloud).

The reality regarding the role of industry standards as the basis for APIs is messy. In the next several posts, I'll take a look at some of the opportunities and challenges for industry standards. First, I'll take a look at how the licenses under which standards are offered by different standards organizations help and hinder standards adoption and convergence.

Derivations and Modifications

I'm not an IP attorney, but you don't need to be an IP attorney to realize that the lack of a standard license for business language standards adds costs, complexity, and poses a barrier to opportunistic use and convergence of industry standards. The matrix below isn't intended as anything like an in-depth analysis of the IP policies of different standards organizations. But then again, most developers and implementers don't do much research into these licenses anyway. They simply assume freely available standards are available for use without restriction - which isn't always a good assumption. While not wildly divergent, the licenses described below do illustrate a few common differences among licenses.

“Learning, education, and HR standards communities have very little to show in terms of cross-domain standards interoperability and convergence despite significant investments over a period of more than a decade.” Chuck Allen, Executive Director of the HR-XML Consortium, made this assessment of standards that cross the boundaries of standards-setting bodies in a “White Paper” submitted to the LETSI SCORM 2.0 Workshop held October 15-17, 2008 in Pensacola, Florida. Read more.

Contact First/Given Name: Anja
Position Title: Business Analyst
Company: Career Junction

Question: Hi I would just like to know if there is a standard HR-XML Requisition Schema. We are trying to import information from SAP reqruitment into our product.

Anja,

Take a look at PositionOpening. You might also take a look at
StaffingOrder, which is tailored to staffing use cases.

PositionOpening was primarily designed around a use case of communicating a position announcement to a job board or recruiting partner. This is your use case? If not please explain. Also, if you send me some sample data info(at)hrinterop.org, perhaps I can take a look to see how it fits or doesn't fit. See the examples below. (actually, I just realized these are out-of-place in the documentation - will fix next week).

ProcessPositionOpeningExample-1.xml

ProcessPositionOpeningExample-2.xml

ProcessPositionOpeningExample-3.xml

ProcessPositionOpeningExample-4.xml

ProcessPositionOpeningExample-5.xml

Chuck Allen

HRInterop was founded by Chuck Allen, who also was a founder of the HR-XML initiative and long-time Executive Director of the HR-XML Consortium, Inc.

Use the contact form or information below:

Chuck Allen, Principal Consultant
HRInterop, LLC
9650 Strickland Rd.
Ste. 103-167
Raleigh, NC 27615
Tel: +1 919 247 6881
Email: chucka [- at -] hrinterop.org

This is news way after the fact, but is "news to me" since I just came across this morning! I had heard that ARTS XML, the standards organization for retail industry was considering closer alignment with the OAGIS architecture. I looks like this conversation has begun in earnest:
http://tinyurl.com/5dz6md

At the recently concluded HR-XML Partnering and Integration Summit there was a presentation by a company that had opportunistically borrowed from HR-XML and ARTs in putting together a time-card integration. It will be nice when this can be done through having a common OAGIS architecture.

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.