10.3. Standards Activities

Standards play a key role in an effective and efficient solution to the development of large-scale systems. It is through standards that openness and flexibility of distributed systems is achieved, and a community of skilled people supported by cost-effective tools and techniques is created. A number of standards activities are working toward greater interoperability and interchange of information among enterprise solutions. These standards will be critical to the future of robust, flexible systems. There are two interesting aspects of the current standards activities worthy of note:

• The standards activities that are likely to have the greatest impact over the next few years are being driven by interested parties within the industry, and supported by lightweight standardization efforts by formal bodies such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Object Management Group (OMG). This is in sharp contrast to standards efforts in the 1980s. Those efforts were dominated by large government-sponsored bodies within the military, and international groups such as the International Standards Organization (ISO) and the Institute of Electric and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). The increased speed of the change of technology has encouraged the industry to form their own streamlined standards activities to create a measured level of consistency and uniformity within various markets. Rather than wait for large standards bodies to set the direction for a particular technology, advanced practices within certain industry domains has been the focal point for new approaches in a range of areas.

• The latest standards focus on solving well-defined problems within the context of the wide area of technology necessary for assembling enterprise-scale solutions in the Internet age. The emphasis appears to be on simple mechanisms for solving key problems, with an openness to extend those mechanisms in useful ways specific to each domain of application. As a result, there are interesting standardization activities taking place in areas such as user interface design and presentation, information modeling, data communication, middleware services, platform functionality, and so on. In the past, many standardization efforts were much too broad in their goals and domain of application. This often led to a slow standardization process and to standards that were complex in nature, making them difficult to interpret, implement, and maintain.