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| Title: | "Problems related to the standards implementation process - LINK CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE" |
| Author: | Eva Soderstrom |
| Source: | Internet |
| Publication Date: | 2000 |
| Free/Fee: | Payment or membership required |
| Reads: | 2061 |
| Abstract: | Standards are an everyday phenomenon, existing in all parts of our lives. Business is no different. As an example, organisations involved in Business-to-Business (B2B) use standards to enable and facilitate communication, information exchange and business transactions. Implementing and using these standards are not trivial activities. The focus of this paper is on potential problems that may occur when implementing B2B standards in organisations, where the problems are related to the process as such. The problems have been derived from an interview study conducted with standards developers (SDO), users (SUO) and software providers (SSO), and complemented with literature findings (SR). There are three implementation process problems: fear of reduced security, requires broad implementation, and general implementation problems. Fear of reduced security concerns, according to SDOs, reduce encryption possibilities, and immaturity of security standards. SSO and SR (Weiss and Spring) mention that standards require a broad acceptance if their use will be successful. As many partners as possible must utilise the standard if potential benefits are to be achieved. SUOs have not explicitly mentioned broad implementation, but one SUO mentioned that they only used standards with two or three partners. This could illustrate that true potential is only achieved when exceeding a certain number of partners. The problem is what number that tips the scale. Lastly, SUO and SR (Meek, 1996) mention problems with implementation taking too long, that implementation requires time if the result is to be a well-functioning, standards-based e-business system. Since “time is money”, time complaints are not surprising. Besides implementation time, SR (Jakobs et al, 1996) and SDO claim standards can be difficult to implement, because specifications often are complex, ambiguous and difficult to interpret. SSOs often take care of implementation on SUO's behalf, and should perhaps have mentioned specification complexities. However, recognition of implementation problems may reflect back on their products, giving them less credibility. In summary, global communication requires standards, but there are concerns to take into account. Instead of focusing on technology, so far set-aside human and usage-related factors must be managed, in e.g. the implementation process, and making standards specifications unambiguous and clear. Such considerations may very well turn out to be the determining issues for whether or not a standard survives. Useful standards are user-friendly standards. |
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