A CONCEPTUAL MODEL FOR COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF STANDARDIZATION OF VERTICAL INDUSTRY LANGUAGES

In today’s global economy and E-commerce, there is increasing need to integrate application systems within and across organizations. Additionally, to lower the cost of application development and maintenance, increase reuse, and support outsourcing, the application development is moving towards component-based development and Web services. While great stride has been made in standardization to achieve interoperability and integration at hardware, operating system, data communication, messaging, and common syntax level, the common semantics required for application integration has not been developed. The standardization of common semantics depends on part icular vertical industries such as insurance, banking, healthcare, and manufacturing. The standardization in each of the verticals has proceeded in ad-hoc and very unique ways. Additionally, they are at different stages of development. In some industries, multiple consortia or groups are developing standards, which significantly overlap with each other. Many vertical industries have developed standards that overlap with each other and with horizontal industry standards. The objective of this research is t o develop a conceptual model for comparative analysis of standardizati on of vertical industry languages, which can be used to evaluate the current standardization practices and recommend ways to improve the standardization processes in the vertical industry domains. A pilot study in the insurance industry has been performed, where representatives of two members of the dominating industry standard, ACORD, were interviewed. The interviews are summarized and reported in this paper.

[1]  Andrew Updegrove,et al.  Standard setting and consortium structures , 1995, STAN.

[2]  Claudia Bach,et al.  The standards process: evolution or revolution? , 1995, STAN.

[3]  William L. Fuerst,et al.  Information technology and sustained competitive advantage: a resource-based analysis , 1995 .

[4]  Kai Jakobs,et al.  A proposal for an alternative standards setting process , 2002, IEEE Commun. Mag..

[5]  Sheila A. McIlraith,et al.  Bringing semantics to Web services , 2003, IEEE Intelligent Systems.

[6]  Stuart E. Madnick,et al.  Data Integration Using Web Services , 2002, EEXTT.

[7]  Michael B. Spring,et al.  The structure of IT standardization , 1996, STAN.

[8]  Huimin Zhao,et al.  A Spanning Tree Based Approach to Identifying Web Services , 2004, Int. J. Web Serv. Res..

[9]  K. Ramamurthy,et al.  Organizational and Interorganizational Determinants of EDI Diffusion and Organizational Performance: A Causal Model , 1999, J. Organ. Comput. Electron. Commer..

[10]  Paul J. Deitel,et al.  Web Services A Technical Introduction , 2002 .

[11]  Roy Rada.  Corporate shortcut to standardization , 1998, CACM.

[12]  Fatemeh Zahedi,et al.  Design, retrieval, and assembly in component-based software development , 2003, CACM.

[13]  Heather Kreger,et al.  Fulfilling the Web services promise , 2003, CACM.

[14]  Rob Procter,et al.  Shaping IT Through Participation in Standards Setting - A Practicable Alternative for Users? , 1999 .

[15]  Rob Procter,et al.  The making of standards: looking inside the work groups , 2001, IEEE Commun. Mag..

[16]  James Snell,et al.  Introduction to Web services architecture , 2002, IBM Syst. J..

[17]  Gerry Miller.  The Web services debate: .NET vs. J2EE , 2003, CACM.