Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Customizing large industry standards

THE PROBLEM

Throughout our consulting engagements with corporates attempting to implement industry standards, two predominant issues keep recurring:
1. Customization of the standard means forking from the standard. Taking updates from this point is at best extremely labor intensive, and at worst impossible.
2. Very few organizations want to implement an entire standard from day one. A more typical usage is a phased approach with core services incrementally released over several years. Absorbing the entire standard up front results in service consumers being expected to understand and work with verbose and confusing generated artefacts (such as XSDs) filled with far more data fields than have actually been implemented. In fact I'd hazard a guess that there are very few cases where more than half of those data fields will ever be implemented.


WHY?


The integration of data and its structure is a major problem for almost all organizations - the bigger the organization the bigger the problem. We have seen many organizations look towards domain industry standards to provide a more structured blueprint for internal and external integration.

Business-to-business standards tend to be fairly effective because each organization involved has a strong financial incentive to adhere to the standard. An example is the AS2805 standard for Australian EFTPOS transactions, which itself was based on the ISO standard 8583.

Internal integration is, however, another story. If you've ever worked in the IT arm of a large organization you'll know what I'm talking about. Almost all software development is project based, and it's an all too common story to hear that the 'refactoring' was descoped to 'phase 2' which - surprise, surprise - never actually ends up being funded.

However, for those lucky enough (or perhaps unlucky enough) to participate in the rare sort of project that does attempt to implement the 'phase 2', you've probably also discovered that adhering to an industry standard is anything but easy. For starters there are few tools available for dealing with standards. Most open standards are available in XSD format accompanied by MicrosoftWord, and MicrosoftExcel documentation, and most proprietary standards are accompanied by equally proprietary vendor lock-in product sales. Beyond this, no standard is ever quite what you need, either missing large areas important to your business, or overly bloated due to a missing-the-point attempt to please all consumers all at once, and more commonly a little of both. Almost all approaches require the consumer to start with the entire standard and then customize for their needs.


SO WHAT?

As practitioners in this space, and still recoiling from the war wounds, these two problems were front of mind in the inception of http://graft.jodoro.com.

Customization

Every model in Graft is internally stored as tiny deltas. When you extend an existing model in Graft you simply add further deltas to the same base structures. Version control and management is baked into the framework of the application. As such, even if you completely rename an existing class, you can easily adopt any future associations to the base class within your extended model. When and what you adopt is controlled automatically via "releases" configured in the 'specify' application.

Templating

In Graft we provide users two distinct ways to extend a model:

1. The most commonly understood approach we call 'active' extension. This quite literally means you start with the entire base model in your scope. Graft then allows users to explicitly descope parts of the model they don't wish to use. Such descoped classes will remain in the default view, but grayed out. This allows users to see what they have removed, and provides the ability to reverse the removal at a later point. Although users can still see grayed out descoped items, such items will not be included in any exports. An example of an actively extended model can be found here: http://graft.jodoro.com/models/31881

2. We are particularly excited to introduce a new approach to extending that we call 'passive' extension. This allows users to begin with everything descoped, and to draw forward only what is of utility right now. This is the approach we strongly recommend be used when working with large industry standards. An example of a passively extended model can be found here: http://graft.jodoro.com/models/31893

Often organizations wish to borrow from more than one standard. Perhaps, for example, the street address structure is particularly weak in their chosen strategic industry standard. Graft allows any number and combination of active and passive extensions within the one custom model. This is again configured in the 'specify' application.

Feel free to extend these and any other public models within Graft. By default extensions of any models will remain private. You can however choose to make your extended models public too by visiting the admin tab.


Doug

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