When applied to software, "universal" generates the same unease as "democratic" did when applied to political regimes. At best it expresses unfulfilled desire; at worst cynical marketing.

So an announcement from the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), a non-profit consortium promoting development of XML as the foundation descriptive language for e-commerce, that it has formed a technical committee to define a Universal Business Language (UBL) is a source of concern. It suggests that the lack of any standardisation amongst XML-based business languages has now been recognised as a serious obstacle to the application of XML to business transactions.

This isn't a minor technical issue. The core argument of the Supply Chain industry is that it is not individual companies that compete, but their supply chains. To get a supply working harmoniously - so the argument goes - it is necessary to extend ERP thinking to the supply chain as a whole and thereby to optimise the whole operation rather than it's individual parts.

Fundamental to co-operation within the supply chain is effective communication between its individual members. XML has long been touted as the answer to this problem. It is now clear that XML is only part of the answer. It provides an agreed syntax, but not an agreed vocabulary. Different groups have therefore developed their own dialects to reflect their own particular interests. The OASIS web site lists over 85 subject-specific schemas, of which more 50 or more could be said to relate to business transactions. A tier two or three company supplying components to the automotive, aerospace and office equipment sectors might therefore need to exchange electronic transactions in three (or more) of these XML dialects.

UBL (from OASIS) now joins xCBL (advanced by Commerce One) and cXML (advanced by Ariba) as a further attempt to prevent the original harmony promised by XML from disintegrating completely. It is to be hoped one of these initiatives works. There are already companies offering services to translate between the common e-Commerce XML standards. Old IT-hands view this latter development with terrible foreboding. The fact that translation tools seldom work 100% is a comparatively minor problem. The alarming rate at which the number of these tools needs to grow to match the population of XML dialects is bad enough. But the emergence of automatic translation tools probably heralds tacit acceptance of yet another computing workaround that destroys utility whilst adding cost.

Unfortunately confusion isn't restricted to the different XML-dialects by which company's might communicate, it extends to registries or repositories, which have been proposed as intermediate locations where companies could post information (profiles) about their preferred methods of conducting business. Here an UN-sponsored initiative (ebXML) has been swiftly followed by an Ariba/Microsoft/IBM initiative - UDDI - that seems to be focussed on giving concrete substance to some form of (proprietary) registry of company information now, whilst leaving much of the detail to be filled out later.

The brave new world of XML-sustained business transactions was supposed to triumph where old-fashioned EDI (Electronic data Interchange) failed.

EDI's comparative failure has been attributed to three basic problems: the complexity of its standards, the fact that there were two competing variants (ANSI's ANSI X12 and the UN-sponsored EDIFACT) and the costs that were imposed by the need to use third party services to relay the message.

When compared to EDI, XML-based e-commerce is no longer looking like the big leap forward. The same three problems persist. Complexity appears, if anything, to have worsened - certainly it has become more explicit. Multiple incompatible standards still exist - indeed having only two broad-based and established e-commerce XML-dialects in the frame would be an advance on the current position. Even the need for third party services, which XML initially promised to eliminate, has re-surfaced.

Is there any hope? Can this burgeoning complexity and bureaucracy be tamed? Possibly. The Betamax/VHS effect - nobody commits serious money until either the industry sorts itself out, or customers collectively opt for one or other of the main contenders - might yet apply. When coupled with a recession, a dearth of new orders might just provoke the industry to develop genuinely open and genuinely universal standards. "Universal" might become a respectable computing term.

Ralph Seeley

*Douglas Adams, A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Now available: enterprise applications market review at the Cambashi Seminar 2002

Other supply chain articles from Cambashi:

What are PLM and SCM?

Supply chain management: reinventing the wheel

Supply chain what?!

back to top