Seeing To It

These are my opinions/intellectual endeavors, and don't have any connection with my employer, Ball State University. [end of needless and superfluous disclaimer... what a conundrum when your education has been done mostly where you work, and you must simultaneously disavow the skills and analyses they taught you to do and yet use those same skills to advance the organization's cause...]

"Quality is the result of a carefully constructed cultural environment. It has to be the fabric of the organization, not part of the fabric." - Phillip Crosby

Beating the drum for standards is not a new thing, but it still seems to be something that is lacking in so many ways. While I have spent quite a lot of time asserting that proprietary formatting of data indicates an inherently weak and short-sighted system, this is just a simple example of the importance of standards-based design from our fellow scientific adventurers in Italy.

Here is why standards are important...

I prepared for the trip to Italy as completely as I could during the time I had, but there were a few things that escaped me, one of which became apparent in the first restroom I went to. At the sink I went to turn on the water when I saw a tap with a C on it. In America that is Cold, but there was a second tap with F on it. Thankfully, the difference between Hot and Calde became immaterial because of the standard: the hot water tap is on the left-hand side. I was able to access the hot water I wished with no more than a passing thought about the labelling. The lack of necessity to translate allowed me to do what I needed to do and learn the translation at a more opportune time.

It isn't a big deal to figure out which tap to use - turn it on and see what happens to the water temperature - but the analogy to computing standards holds true. If you create something proprietary, you must create everything else around it to be proprietary, a la the Robber Barons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and you both limit and endanger yourself. Following standards, though, allows interoperability and proper use of information, regardless of the label.

Adherence to standards may at times feel like a limitation, however it allows the approaches taken within systems to truly be differentiated. I need only point to systems where speed was increased through the use of 'best-effort' delivery protocols, rather than assured delivery, to point out why the shortcuts are not the right ways to do things. If your data disappears, how much time was saved? In the same vein, if your data is stored in XML format, then it can truly be used wherever you care to use it, as long as where you are using it adheres to standards, which all such systems SHOULD.

Creativity is great when measured and done well... rampant and without shape it can cause burns. Arrivederci!