On 28/10/2010 11:25, Grahame Grieve wrote: > And none of your examples are vertical industry IT standards. > Mark Bezzina for Stds Australia pointed out to me that IT > vertical standards are a totally different thing to every other > kind of standard.
Telecoms, to take one example, consists of many layers of protocols and technologies, most standardised, which form a very impressive stack. It's all IT, it just isn't seen as vertical any more because it is such an assumed part of our technological infrastructure. In terms of basic development process, I don't see IT 'vertical' standards as any different from any other standard. I just can't think of any kind of standard at all that should be developed in committees of randomly self-selected participants, many with no design or other professional experience. Let's be clear - all such standards are engineering specifications of one kind or another, and argumentation by committee simply is not a recognised or valid development paradigm for elaborating any kind of technical artefact. It could be used to discuss one, talk about its requirements, but it won't be able to build the thing in question. And yet this is what happens in health informatics. In finance, the standardisation that occurs is mostly by industry agreements, +/- government involvement, to set e.g. agreed classification of industry sectors, security types, and so on. The finally agreed schemes come from existing schemes used by companies in the industry, not from committee discussions. Much standardisation in the military sector comes from defence forces institutions and supplier companies. > > You're trying to portray Health IT as some kind of > bizarre exemption, in that things are totally done > in a weird way. But I don't think it's an exemption: I > think most IT verticals have the same problem, which > is that standards are being used as a stalking horse > for research. I would certainly agree with this last statement for e-health - and it is a terrible way to do research. I have not encountered it in any other IT area, though. - thomas* * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/private/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20101028/bf666923/attachment.html>
