A Conceptual Model For Comparative Analysis Of Standardization Of Vertical Industry Languages

Hemant Jain, School of Business Administration, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, and Huimin Zhao, School of Business Administration, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

1/01/2005
(Original Publish Date: 2000)

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 particular 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 to develop a conceptual model for comparative analysis of standardization 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.