Agile Lifecycle Management of Standards for Data Exchange

摘要

Today's businesses need to innovate new products and services and streamline and optimize associated processes faster to remain competitive. System integrations are essential processes for businesses to achieve these goals. Therefore, companies' ability to integrate systems or reconfigure integrated systems quickly and cost-effectively significantly impacts their competitiveness. To achieve such performance, enterprises must rely on standards, the most important of which are the data exchange standards (DES). Up to eighty percent of the integration time and cost is spent on semantic integration, and DES is where the semantics lie. Consequently, the ability to quickly use and adapt DES to their innovations and processes is crucial—we term this Agile Lifecycle Management of Data Exchange Standards (ALMODES).Traditionally, standards are managed and used in a platform-specific form and with standalone and file-based applications. This norm does not meet today's agility needs as enterprises have to deal with heterogeneous syntaxes optimized for different objectives. Furthermore, the file-based management of standards and the usage specifications derived from it cause inconsistencies because there is neither a standard format for the usage specification nor a single source of truth. Developing, reviewing, and approving usage specifications by distributing files becomes a nightmare as the integration ecosystem grows. The file-based usage specification is typically done in a different syntax than the standard using a word processor or spreadsheet. This practice also causes a significant deficiency in agility as the usage specification is disconnected from the standard. Therefore, the usage specification must be manually updated as the standard evolves, causing significant delays and costs in adopting the new and better standard versions.To address these problems and enhance DES development and use agility, this dissertation adapts word embeddings and an international standard for modeling DES called UN/CEFACT Core Component Technical Specification (CCTS) into a web-based system for collaborative standard development and use. It has been adopted by industry and has demonstrated a two- to three-fold reduction in normal usage time and a six-fold reduction in development cycle time.