Open Standards For Business And Economic Growth

As a business leader in your industry, you may have heard that standards are a key component to business success. But what exactly is a standard? And how does it really help achieve business success?

A standard is a common way for multiple groups to achieve the same goals. For example, the ubiquitous traffic signal with its red/amber/green is a standard across the country & world today. The communication protocol underlying the Internet (HTTP) is another worldwide standard.

A standard specification, when developed, is like a blueprint: it tells you what you must do to build something. Specifically, Information technology (IT) standards provide you with a blueprint for data models, messaging models, interface models, as well as overall IT architecture models (such as SOA). While standards can be proprietary and deliver some of the value indicated here, the true power of standards is unleashed only if they are Open Standards. An Open Standard is one that is developed and maintained in a transparent fashion with involvement from all stakeholders – users, vendors, industry experts - and is available for use by all members of the community, free from any intellectual property encumbrances or other issues.

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So how do Open Standards drive business success? In today’s rapidly changing marketplace, businesses must be able to integrate and leverage new technology at a speed that outpaces their competition and is aligned with changing customer preferences. In order to reach this level of flexibility and adaptability for technology adoption, companies need to integrate and gain functionality and efficiencies through the use of Open Standards.

Open Standards take you farther, faster, by speeding the development process, enabling freedom to change, offering choice, providing flexibility, supporting faster time to market and increased resiliency. Open Standards are about lowering the cost of creating and implementing new innovations, enabled by the firm base that standardisation provides, and the flexibility that Open Standards based integration offers.

An Example of Standards Effectiveness

In any business operation, leaders are faced with the challenge of integrating many different hardware and software solutions to deliver one enterprise experience. Businesses can use Open Standards to more easily connect parts of their operations both internally and externally with their customers, partners, and suppliers. In a world without standards, integration is a many to many interface scenario. Each integration point requires unique skills and programming to ensure proper communication between entities. When standards are used however, hardware and applications need only use one standard interface to ensure that the different disparate entities can easily integrate with each other.

Open Standards provide the efficiencies necessary to create a flexible, responsive system with lower maintenance costs, which enables business growth without a huge rise in IT costs. And strong, sustainable business growth drives overall economic growth for all the stakeholders.

Retail Industry and Open Standards – A Good Fit

The Retail Industry is a fine example of an industry that stands to benefit the most from the use of Open Standards. For retailers to sustain business growth, they must be able to sense and respond to the demands of their customers in a fast and efficient manner. Retailers who miss the opportunity to implement popular new technologies, for example, self checkout in grocery format stores, risk losing customers to those who provide such a service.

Without Open Standards, speed and cost of new technology integration can be prohibitive – especially as the size of operations increases, resulting in a lack of customer service function needed by the retailer to be competitive. Inability to add new functionality or upgrade existing functionality in a company’s IT systems can be detrimental to business. Open Standards can help you avoid this trap and keep your IT systems geared for business growth.

Johanna Koester is strategic leader, WorldWide Retail Software Standards, IBM& Viswanath Srikanth is technical leader, WorldWide Retail Software Standards, IBM