Along with the growing cloud-computing hype is growing push back along the lines that cloud-computing is merely a new way for vendors to pitch the same offerings wrapped up in the latest buzzword. Shally Steckerl, a recruiting strategist and consultant, delivers a blistering post along these lines on ERE.net.

It is easy to sympathize with Shalley and other users of HR services who see new buzzwords advance in vendor marketing campaigns often at a pace more rapid than functional improvements or efficiencies evident in the vendor offerings themselves. However, vendor marketing hype aside, cloud computing is (or should be), more than a re-branding of existing SAAS or ASP offerings.

As I mentioned in my previously post, there isn't unanimity about what cloud computing is. However, most associate the phrase with an approach in which IT or business capabilities are accessed as services through publicly available (or readily available) Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). While HR abounds with SAAS providers, there aren't many that arguably fit the cloud model. Most HR service providers today simply don't have the well-defined APIs. There are companies that likely have a head start such as ADP Employease and Workday (links to API pages). However, contrary to what Shalley says in his rant and vendor hype aside, the cloud model is quite new and is distinct from mere SAAS and ASP offerings.

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.