InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
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March 5, 2001 |
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XML-Like The Air That We Breathe
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By Martin Marshall (mmarshall@zonaresearch.com)
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Arrow Electronics Inc. has implemented nine of RosettaNet's Partner Interface Processes with 12 suppliers and one customer. The turnaround time to the customer has been reduced from the next day to the same day, cutting 15 hours off a process that was previously handled by EDI.
The health-care industry is also moving from EDI toward XML-based processing, albeit more slowly than RosettaNet and the electronics-component industry. Part of the rationale for these standards initiatives lies in the human readability of XML-tagged health-care records, compared with the indirect readability of EDI-encoded records, which are untagged fields of data separated by vertical bars.
The Mayo Clinic's Clinical Notes Project report was instrumental in swaying health-care institutions to vote for HL7's XML-based version 3 messaging, but health-care officials are reluctant to make statements about quantifying any perceived business process or error-rate improvements. But it's agreed that new XML-based applications will be used across the health-care industry, rather than being confined to proprietary formats on an institution-by-institution basis.
Business IT executives usually have strong technical reasons for making strategic investments, such as those that would be required for XML-related projects. Many IT managers indicate plans to convert existing data into XML form to enable enterprise search capabilities. Users have long felt frustrated by not being able to access, let alone search across, data that they know exists in their company, but which isn't in a searchable form.
IT managers expect XML technology to shorten application-development time and enable the performance of new operations once the data is in XML form. It's too soon to obtain broad quantitative data on how much application-development time will be saved, but the few IT managers who were willing to make an estimate considered themselves conservative in estimating 30% to 50% speedups in development time.
XML means that programmers will have only one data interface to program instead of many, and they'll no longer have to embed all business processes in each application. XML will let business processes be shared across applications.
The price of admission is that programmers will have to learn the tagging syntaxes of XML and its various processes, such as the creation of style sheets in the Extensible Stylesheet Language. The learning curve shouldn't be too steep--XML is similar to learning a scripting language such as JavaScript, rather than a third-generation language such as C++ or Java.
Only a small percentage of IT managers feel compelled to adopt XML to participate in online exchanges. This suggests that, despite the proliferation of more than 1,000 business-to-business hubs in the past year, they're not yet a major force driving business IT decisions. It also reveals the nascent stage of XML usage in B-to-B hubs.
XML has many hurdles to widespread adoption. The top concerns are security, standards development, schema development, the maturity of XML tools, and top management's lack of understanding of XML.
The security concerns are already being addressed. Microsoft, VeriSign, and webMethods published an XML Key Management Specification with the prospect of an uncontested adoption path through the World Wide Web Consortium standards body. XML encryption, which should be standardized by year's end, will enable the encryption of fields within a document, such as a credit-card number.
An XML standard for enterprise management of access-control lists and authorization mechanisms is also needed. Access-control lists are data tables that contain the information about which users can access a system, which applications they can access, and what data they're entitled to see. The authorization mechanism contains passwords and user IDs. The classic problem found in most companies is that multiple access-control lists exist, tied to different applications within a company.
There are two conflicting standards in this area: S2ML, backed by Netegrity, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, VeriSign, and webMethods; and AuthXML, endorsed by BMC, Deloitte & Touche, Novell, and Securant Technologies. Until the S2ML/AuthXML issue is resolved, there won't be industry agreement on XML-based security, so we may see early adopters promising to change their software if a standard arises.
IT managers are concerned about the immaturity of standards for embedding business processes into applications. While business processes can be embedded as tags in the XML data, in heterogeneous environments it's unclear whose XML server will control the acknowledgments, workflow, and other processing that may accompany the data.
For example, it's unclear whether Microsoft's BizTalk Orchestration implementation will be able to exchange complex business-process objects with non-Microsoft servers. The potential solution lies in agreements among IBM, Microsoft, and others over the Web Services Description Language. This is built on top of the Simple Object Access Protocol, used for remote invocation of processes between XML servers.
Schema standardization is the great boon and bane of XML. As vertical industries achieve standardization on procedures and data term definition schemas, XML servers will provide a mechanism for the commonality of data exchange on an industrywide basis.
It will be a challenge within vertical industries to agree on the intricate procedures that are most germane to their businesses. For example, the petrochemical industry must embed procedures specified by the Interstate Commerce Commission for handling hazardous materials, and the pharmaceutical industry must embed procedures specified by the Food and Drug Administration.
As much as HTML and the Web attracted businesses to exploit Internet technology for commercial purposes, XML advances will have a profound effect on automated B-to-B and internal company interactions.
Martin Marshall is Zona Research managing director. Reach him at mmarshall@zonaresearch.com.
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