I was made aware that UN/CEFACT is currently reassessing stakeholder needs and priorities to ensure that its work is addressing the most urgent requirements. On the surface this looks like a great idea, however as a long-time UN/CEFACT participant who still follows the groups activities, I was taken by surprise by the status of this effort. I double checked the UN/CEFACT website for an official announcement, inviting stakeholders to provide feedback, but found none.

The way I became aware of the effort was through a third party who found out through an announcement to participate in an online survey. The survey forms part of the UN/CEFACT eBGT Gap analysis project, and I applaud UN/CEFACT for this effort and project.

However, having filled out the survey I noticed that almost all the questions, except for the first few dealing with questions about the survey participant, were formulated to be answered by end users of the UN/CEFACT deliverables. Now, don’t get me wrong, it is very important that UN/CEFACT deliverables meet the requirements of the end users, but are they the ones who select these deliverables to be part of the solution?

No! The majority of end users within eBusiness, which includes B2B, B2G, G2G, B2G and G2C, have no say in what standards to use. It is only a few key players that determine what is to be used, such as big commercial users and head government branches. In additions these key players involve software and solution providers in their efforts to determine the real end user requirements and the standards that will be used.

Illumonus is currently involved in four international projects working with such key players. At the start of each we quickly determine what standards are possible candidates for each project, after having defined the end user’s requirements, we evaluate those candidate standards to select the best fitting ones. Without going into details, we did eliminate some of UN/CEFACT’s standards right at the start, but also selected some as potential candidates, and finally selected one of those to be used.

The reason I mention this is that UN/CEFACT should be more than interested to find out what where the reasons for not selecting certain standards, as well as why others where selected? Getting this feedback from the real key players will help UN/CEFACT in prioritizing the many projects they have underway. It may actually result in some projects being terminate as they have no relevance in the real world, at the same time there may be the need to create a new project to address the gaps in standards that are identified.

The simple truth is that only a very small percentage of end users actually have any say in what standards to use, regardless what the rest has to say. Most of these key players never have been, or no longer are, participants in the UN/CEFACT process. UN/CEFACT needs to find a way to involve these key players, who are the main stakeholders, otherwise their gap analysis is a waste of time.

I wonder if UN/CEFACT really is interested in real world feedback, or is using this gap analysis project to justify their current direction of creating new standards and ignoring their most popular and used but old standards?

Update: I received a copy of an internal email send out by CEFACT’s Forum Vice Chair that contained the following statement:

“As a reminder the project will execute a number of gap analysis in the eBusiness area aimed at defining a viable strategy going forward, notably for Core Component based standards and applications.”

Sadly this confirms my suspicion that the survey is used to justify the Forums current direction instead of finding out what existing standards are being used by their stakeholders to ensure resources continue to be available to maintain them, and which current projects are relevant in order to continue work on them.

Regardless of what I think, I encourage you all to take the survey. To do so click here!

Tags: eBusiness, Government, Trade, CEFACT