>well as by the virtual cemetery of earlier failed proprietary efforts,
>is the financial sector.
The financial sector has been at this for decades, since
we were in diapers. Their only goal is to disrupt and
destroy standards. When there are standards, people
will do business with each other without the financial
sector. When you have a UML diagram of who's doing
what, NOBODY in their right mind would agree to
send their data to banks and governments --much less,
pay huge overheads and costs for their trouble. Bits
are Bits. we would stovepipe around the Bank, fairly
quickly. (I do not minimize the need for identity or
reputation framework, or secure collateral etc.etc.)
Regarding standards. Individuals have no power to
establish them, from a practical standpoint. Large software
vendors have some power but certainly will not abandon
proprietary hooks. Large standards bodies and even
governments are similarly incapable of agreeing on things
that result in transfers of advantage of such magnitude.
OMG and numerous other standards bodies met several
times to explore interoperabiltiy and harmonization...
http://www.omg.org/interop/presentations/SummitResults.pdf
...my comments if interested, http://www.ledgerism.net/collab.htm
Since the universe willfully resists agreeing on semantics
and behaviors of objects over networks, the thinking has
prevailed for many years at least since ISO 11179 that
registries be maintained, for these artifacts, essentially
giving a unique ID to the conceptual entity instead of trying
impossibly to gain cooperation or agreement among standards
bodies (whose executives and members are intent on their
own aggrandizement and business schemes).
Where it is at today is the OASIS ebxml RegRep, or
W3C XML Schema architecture.
http://www.google.com/search?q=oasis+regrep
Sorry for my tedious writing style, I really know nothing
but I'm tired of waiting. I been reading these mailing
lists and in the standards for 6 or 7 years now.
Nothing is going to happen until some company
in taiwan produces a p2p accounting tablet of
some sort, that can sync one's debits with the
other party's credits directly. Why is this so scary?
TOdd ledgerism.net
At 07:48 AM 3/6/2004, Anders Rundgren wrote:
The FI e-standardization blues
-----------------------------------
Have you seen the movie "A beautiful mind"? In case
you have not it is about a Nobel-prize winner (disturbed
but brilliant at the same time), who's primary thesis is
an game optimization theory that goes as follows:
"You gain more by doing something that your entire group
gains by, than by doing something that only benefits yourself"
I believe this applies extremely well the establishment of
infrastructure standards.
An industry which seems completely unaffected by this theory as
well as by the virtual cemetery of earlier failed proprietary efforts,
is the financial sector. Even in a very small country like Sweden
the FI sector (only comprising of 4-5 major banks) have
managed to not unite on:
- Electronic invoices (3 different) [1]
- On-line payment systems (4-5 different)
- Citizen electronic ID software/system (3-4 different)
A recent US example is NACHA's Project ACTION, were
the members preferred shelving the entire project rather than
putting it in the public domain where it might have spurred the
creation of a highly needed on-line payment system standard.
It is also interesting to note that banks in spite of their heavy
use of IT, are virtually invisible in general standardization
efforts and that they in their own standardization efforts,
often charge huge member fees excluding a lot of potentially
useful people and organizations.
I believe it is time for the financial industry to [re]enter the
21st century with an open mind instead of unmotivated fear.
Anders Rundgren
1] After 5 years(!) of unsuccessful operation, they have finally
concluded that the customers' apparently have no interests in
supporting three invoicing "standards" that essentially do the
same thing.
