In some of my recent presentations, I've talked about where HR-XML has enjoyed uptake within the broader HR services ecosphere and where it hasn't. See slides 11 and 12 from the deck embedded below (or if the embed is giving you problems, view here). Simply stated, HR-XML has had some success as a starting point for B2B integrations, such as those between applicant tracking systems and screening service providers. This is good. There is a lot of value in such connections. Where HR-XML hasn't proved as useful is for those stakeholders that need a data model that works in a consistent way across HR business processes. I've mentioned in prior posts, the forthcoming 3.0 library goes a long way towards providing the uniform model that has been lacking.

On slide 12, I cover support by "tool and platform" providers. There are a few success stories here, but these are fairly specialized offerings. For example, in one of our recent Webinars, Pilotfish Technology demonstrated an HR-XML-2_5-Enrollment to ASC-X12-834 transformation offered with their XCS eiConsole platform.

With the version 3.0 release, HR standards are much better positioned for some level of support by enterprise application integration (EAI) vendors. This is mainly because the version 3.0 release fits into an architecture that is bigger than just HR. As I've written elsewhere, the version 3.0 library will be the first industry standard to be designed as a plug-in to the Open Applications Group Integration Specification (OAGIS).

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.