Open Malaysia

All for open standards

By Hasannudin Saidin

OPEN standards are an important catalyst for driving new business and innovation, but because they are typically part of technology, they are often overlooked and sometimes even taken for granted.

Do standards even matter?

In today's digital environment, you bet they do. Practically everything we touch in our physical world, from our entertainment devices to transportation, financial services, communications, correspondence and even education, work better when based on open standards.

Over the next five years, as the performance of IT continues to increase while its cost declines, powerful technologies, combined with open standards and the Internet, are being used to build a global infrastructure that will give people and industries access to more resources worldwide. The resulting environment will be more cross-industry and characterised by collaborative innovation that is beyond our expectations. All this will be made possible by open standards.

Simply put, open standards are a product of independent people working together to collaboratively develop solutions for addressing common requirements and goals that help businesses and consumers. Where would we be today without standards in electricity, engineering and building codes and other areas? By adopting standards, an industry can achieve uncommon things.

Open standards act as a blueprint, an insurance policy if you will, that allows a variety of technologies and industries such as healthcare, financial services, automotive, retail, energy and others to share information and link it faster, easier and at lower costs. Interoperability is the goal to deliver better goods, services and intelligent data. This gives businesses choice rather than one proprietary solution.

Every business and institution has important data buried throughout the enterprise and its extended partner network - useful data about skills, supply, demand, quality, consumer behaviour and more. All that information can potentially be integrated, analysed and exploited in innovative ways, thanks to the emergence of open standards in virtually every industry.

Think of open standards as the foundation that will help guarantee that the information created today will be easily accessible and be able to be processed in the future to benefit industries and consumers alike.

Moreover, as we see the three-dimensional (3-D) Internet and virtual world applications and services develop, the common communications blueprint between these various worlds will be based on open standards - much as today's Internet protocol allows any component on a network to talk to any other component, creating an infrastructure for collaborating and coordinating resources across the globe.

Over the next five years, look for open standards to shape the way we do business in the following ways:

• Increased negotiating power and competition will be the norm as open standards make single supplier situations a thing of the past. Open standards will propel a more competitive marketplace for goods and services resulting in lower prices, and more choices for everyone.
• Small and medium-sized busi­nesses will benefit tremendously from open standards such as Open Document Format and Web-based applications. Information will be more easily shared among computing systems such as desktops, laptops, portable devices or data centres without single choice, proprietary operating systems and application roadblocks.
• Virtual worlds such as Second Life, ActiveWorlds and others will be a big part of how we interact, exchange information and do business. These virtual worlds will create new ways of finding and working with customers in the 3-D Internet, along with socialising, collaborating, training and selling. Open standards will allow the exchange of information, virtual goods, currency and even people (albeit, virtual people) in the metaverse.
• A new generation of industry-specific standards based on service-oriented architecture and open infrastructure standards will be created. These will couple technology and business processes in healthcare, education, insurance, banking, telecommunications and other areas to decrease costs, speed time-to-market, expand available options and resources, improve communications, reduce risk and create more durable solutions.

For example, open standards-based technology will serve as the foundation for a new era in health analytics that will integrate clinical, financial, operational, claims, genomic and other medical data in a secure and private format that allows for rapid analysis and reporting of vital insights from millions of patient encounters to help prevent and fight disease.

Open standards are increasing at the head: of innovation and new business. As radically new forms of collaboration take hold - within a company, between companies, with online communities of experts and even with previously unknown individuals worldwide - consider what we could lose in the absence of open standards. Open standards are the glue that will tie all this together and give businesses choice.

IBM's chief executive officer survey suggests that no matter what financial metric is used - revenue growth, operating margin growth or average profit over time - those who categorise themselves as strong collaborators consistently come out on top. A retreat from open standards would clearly undermine what our customers believe to be the keen competitive advantage of collaborative innovation.
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The writer is director, government programmes, IBM Malaysia.