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Ensuring that "a rose is a rose" – the value of standards for managing knowledge

by Rebecca O. Barclay, Staff Correspondent, Knowledge Transfer International

Formal and informal standards for information, hardware, software, and many business-related activities play a key role in our ability to define, identify, classify, and communicate knowledge. Consider, for example, the importance of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), the decidedly unglamorous and non-trendy basic 128 characters for representing text and commands. Without ASCII, not only would the World Wide Web be bare of information, but it would be far more difficult for computers in general to share information.

The role of information standards in business
Many organizations first encountered formal standards for information itself as part of the total quality management (TQM) movement. In the early 1990s, many businesses began implementing the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9000 standards for quality management and quality assurance to facilitate international trade. This series of standards represents international consensus on the essential features of a quality system to ensure the effective operation of businesses in the public and private sectors. Today, more than 80 countries have adopted the ISO 9000 series as national standards.

Many business managers are conversant with the ISO standards for quality systems, but they may be unaware of the extent to which a variety of other information-related standards contribute to managing organizational knowledge. Given the growing emphasis in business on knowledge management for performance support, reducing costs, and providing value for customers and for the organization as a whole, standards that aid knowledge management activities by promoting and ensuring that codified knowledge can be readily accessed, distributed, and maintained are particularly relevant today.

If knowledge is a critical corporate asset, would you want your knowledge-processing technology to be incompatible with crucial standards for that technology? You expect all your 3&half-inch diskettes to fit into all your 3&half-inch diskette drives. Should you be concerned when your retrieval software fails to find information in a database? We think so.

Access to information is critical, but not everyone can or does use the same full-text search and retrieval tools. If an information supplier happens to be working on a platform that doesn't support a particular product, others will still want to be able to access that information with whatever tools are available to them -- no matter who created it. ANSI/NISO Z39.50-1995, an eagerly awaited U.S. standard for information retrieval, specifies criteria for supporting searching and information retrieval across computer platforms, including over the Internet.

What if you knew where online information resided, but the commands you needed to use in retrieving it were proprietary? ANSI/NISO Z39.58-1992 provides a common command language for interactive online information retrieval. The standard identifies and describes nineteen non-proprietary commands that are particularly useful for systems designers and others concerned with specifying uniform command terminology.

Managing knowledge requires establishing relationships among terms and presenting information in a way that meets users' needs. Thesauri, valuable tools for organizing and classifying the building blocks of knowledge, rely on a uniform system of headings, descriptors, and cross references to ensure consistency of presentation. ANSI/NISO Z39.19-1993 describes how to construct, format, and manage a thesaurus that can facilitate information retrieval.

Information, the "stuff" we exchange when we share knowledge, should be formatted to guarantee access and re-usability. ISO 8879: 1986, which describes the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), is a fundamental tool in the world of electronic information exchange. Many government departments in the U.S. and Europe think the standard is important enough that they mandate its use. Why? They've been burned by purchases of technology that produced electronic warehouses full of incompatibly-formatted information. Not surprisingly, SGML is the foundation for HTML, perhaps the most widely used information standard of all.

Standards, global competitiveness, and knowledge management
Compliance with published standards is voluntary in the U.S., but the national governments of many other countries mandate conformance to specific standards. So for firms that do business globally, compliance with standards is a real plus in their ability to compete. "Products and services that follow international standards can increase market access and acceptance and can provide a competitive advantage," writes Patricia Harris, Executive Director of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), a major standards development organization in the United States.

Most businesses already recognize the benefits of using standards to help guarantee the quality and reliability of products and services. They are invaluable for international trade, serving as common references among and between nations, regions, and trading partners. Standards also play an important role in emerging fields and technologies, where there is a need to define terminology and accumulate databases of quantitative information.

Complying with information-related standards provides for compatibility and interoperability among systems, increases the usability of organizational knowledge, and improves the ease of maintaining and distributing it, three key factors in effective knowledge management. Standards help undergird a consistent approach to managing knowledge, which has become a competitive strategy of choice for many firms.

A look at the standards development process
A variety of standards development organizations supports the creation and maintenance of standards throughout the world. At the international level, such formal, non-profit organizations as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) participate in and promote standardization activities in conjunction with their national and regional counterparts and such organizations as UNESCO and the World Health Organization.

A number of industry- and vendor-funded standards development consortia (for example, the World Wide Web Consortium) also play an important role in developing and promoting standards that pertain to knowledge management issues and activities.

Membership in standards development organizations is usually open to manufacturers, vendors, users, consumer groups, testing laboratories, government organizations, engineering professions, and research organizations with demonstrated expertise and interest in the work being done. In the United States, participation in the standards development process is voluntary and, in fact, several contributors to KM Briefs and KM Metazine and our predecessor publication have participated in the work of standards development.

International Organization for Standardization
The ISO, a worldwide federation of national standards bodies from more than 110 countries, was established following World War II "to promote the development of standardization and related activities in the world with a view to facilitating the international exchange of goods and services, and to developing cooperation in the spheres of intellectual, scientific, technological and economic activity."

The name "ISO" comes from the Greek isos, meaning equal and it is not, as many infer, an acronym for the name of the organization. The ISO has published more than 9300 voluntary, consensus-based International Standards that contain technical specifications or other criteria for consistent use as definitions, rules, or guidelines to ensure that materials, products, processes, and services conform to agreed-upon standards worldwide. International standardization is a fact of life for many technologies in such diverse fields as information processing and communications, banking and financial services, energy production and utilization, shipbuilding, textiles, packaging, and distribution of goods. In the computer industry, for example, ISO's open systems interconnection (OSI) is a series of well-known standards for communications systems. ISO standards used in banking and finance include international codes for country names, currencies, and languages to help eliminate duplication and incompatibilities in collecting, processing, and disseminating information. An ISO standard defines the format of credit cards, phone cards, and other "smart" cards to ensure that the cards can be used worldwide.

The General Secretariat of the ISO is located in Geneva, Switzerland, but international standards development activities take place around the world. The ISO estimates that a dozen or more standards-related meetings are held daily, a number that attests to the growing importance of standards and standardization in a global economy. The scope of ISO activities extends to all fields except electrical and electronic engineering, which is covered by the IEC. A joint ISO/IEC technical committee handles standardization efforts for information technology.

The standardization sector of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) also participates in developing information technology standards. Standards developers in the U.S. are usually affiliated with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), which is the U.S. representative to the ISO and the IEC. (The ISO home page lists international standards and drafts of standards that can be searched by keywords or reference numbers.)

The National Information Standards Organization
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) is the only U.S. organization accredited by ANSI to develop and maintain technical standards for information services, libraries, publishers, and others involved in the business of sharing and accessing data and information. Established in 1939 as committee Z39 of the American Standards Association (now known as the American National Standards Institute). NISO was founded to develop standards for library work and documentation.

The organization also provides a mechanism for the United States to participate in the work of the ISO Technical Committee on Information and Documentation (TC 46). NISO has developed and published more than 30 standards that cover such topics as electronic publishing, information storage and retrieval, and developing indexes, thesauri, and databases, many of which are directly applicable to knowledge management activities. As a participant in the international standards development community, NISO has also adopted several ISO standards to avoid duplication and redundancy in U.S. standards.

In the 1995 Annual Report, NISO Executive Director Patricia Harris pointed out that the demand for international standards applicable to information-based businesses is increasing, and she noted the key role played by the U.S. "Almost half of the 850 new international standards that the ISO published in 1995 were in the field of information technology." The U.S. is recognized a leader in these standards development efforts, with more than 400 ISO working groups being led by experts from the U.S.

For more information, go to the home page for NISO

World Wide Web Consortium
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) promotes "standards for the evolution of the Web and interoperability between WWW products by producing specifications and reference software." W3C is an international consortium founded in collaboration with CERN, the European Commission, and DARPA. The consortium is hosted in the U.S. by the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science and in Europe by INRIA, and membership is open to any organization interested in issues of standardization and interoperability. W3C maintains a repository of information about the Web, especially specifications, for developers and users, and provides a reference code implementation to promote standards. The consortium also offers various prototype applications to demonstrate the use of new technology. Although W3C is funded by industrial members, it is a vendor-neutral organization that makes newly developed products available to all interested parties. Consortium members have access to new products one month prior to their public release.

The work on specifications and development focuses on three broad technical areas plus related issues: user interface, technology and society, and architecture. W3C recently announced the HTML 3.2 specification that provides for such features as tables, applets, and text flow around images and is backwards compatible with HTML 2.0. (W3C also acknowledged the failure of HTML 3.0 to gain acceptance, evidence that standards don't always work.) The consortium is also working with vendors on extensions to HTML for multimedia objects, scripting, style sheets, layout forms, high quality printing, and mathematics.

W3C is currently working on a technology identified as a Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS). PICS is a pair of specifications that provide for self-labeling of Internet content by the author or publisher and third-party labeling. The specifications are value neutral, specifying only the format of labels and how they can be transmitted, rather than any actual content.

By the end of 1996, Netscape and Microsoft browsers will support PICS, all major filtering software vendors will ship PICS-compliant software, and all major online services will distribute PICS-compliant filtering software to their customers.

In conjunction with CommerceNet, W3C has undertaken a joint electronic payment initiative (JEPI) to ensure the interoperability of existing and future protocols for secure electronic commerce. The goal of JEPI, scheduled for delivery in September 1996, is to provide an architecturally viable mechanism for determining the payment instrument, the payment amount, and the payment protocol.

For additional information, go to the W3C home page.

Information-related standards relevant for managing knowledge
Businesses have begun to recognize and value knowledge as a strategic resource. To manage and optimize that resource, they need tools that help define, organize, classify, and re-use organizational knowledge. Standards are among the most basic but important tools available.

Rebecca O.Barcaly, Staff Correspondent,
Knowledge Transfer International, Publisher of KM Briefs and KM Metazine, www.tkci.com
Contact: Ron_Miskie@ktic.com

Reprinted with permission of the publisher

 

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