Diverging standards
On the e-commerce side, most organisations are falling in behind ebXML, but "few IT professionals in Australia seems to realise Tradegate (www.tradegate.com.au) is the [Australian] government-nominated standards authority," warns Hubbub's Janson. Tradegate ECA is a not-for-profit, non-government, user organisation with the primary role of facilitating the use of electronic commerce techniques for the exchange of information between customers and their suppliers. Janson would like to see more government attention given to this area, including a marketing effort, as he fears Australian industry might otherwise repeat the mistake it made with EDI and X.12--initially adopting the X.12 standard and subsequently incurring extra costs with the switch to UN/EDIFACT. "Today Australian based companies utilise a mix of X.12 and EDIFACT and custom EDIFACT/X.12 like files," he observes.
Janson is also concerned by vendors pushing their own variations when ebXML is clearly the future: "I don't think the answer is necessarily BizTalk, CommerceOne, Ariba, or WebMethods. What we need is the adoption of standards for implementing E-Business processes." He suggests organisations should start work on ebXML now. Tradegate's plan for a schema repository will play an important part, because "Australian companies seem fixated on their particular business rules and frequently implement them without comparing the cost with the associated return on investment." Cortex eBusiness' Moore concurs. "Industry standard XML document type definitions...can make a big impact when widely adopted."
Variations played down
Vendors play down questions about variations on standards. Borland's Wright says that because XML is self-defining and dynamic, there's not much scope to achieve user lock-in, and certainly less than there is with Java.
He also pointed out that even though various groups are establishing common sets of tags to facilitate data interchange, there's nothing to stop someone adding their own private tags--if an application doesn't recognise a tag, it simply ignores it. Unlike flat files, the order and length of data items are not critical.
More fundamentally, the standards themselves are changing. "W3C is running as fast as it can to stay in the same place," says Monash's Hurst. Companies want to get products to market as quickly as possible, he said, pointing to the way XSL style sheets showed up in Microsoft's Internet Explorer before the standard was finished.
The rapid evolution of standards--for example, XSLT 1.0 was quickly followed by version 1.1 when problems were found with the original specification--and the growth in the number of XML related tools makes purchasing decisions difficult. "What was the right decision one week may be wrong the next week," Hurst says.
