Standards and Standardization - A Research Project

Web Services: Standards and Standardization Sandeep Purao , Ph.D. Associate Professor of IST Enterprise Informatics and Integration Center Affiliations: Standards Interest Group, Socio-technical Systems Lab

Why study ICT standards
The noisiest of … battles will be about standards. The eyes of most sane people tend to glaze over at the very mention of technical standards. But in the computer industry, new standards can be the source of enormous wealth, or the death of corporate empires. With so much at stake, standards arouse violent passions.”
(The Economist, 27 February 1993)

What is a standard?
An agreed upon response to a recurring problem, perceived, anticipated or real, that is codified for the purpose of communication
(Moen 1998)

Where do standards come from? (Public) R & D Patents Standards Adapted from: Kahin 2007 Expected Trajectory Observed Trajectory (Public) R & D Patents Standards Anticipatory Standards

Anticipatory, Interoperability
Anticipatory Standards
Shapers and drivers of markets (Cargill 1989), pre-emptive (Lynch 1993), and future-oriented (Bonino and Spring 1991)
Interoperability standards
Integrated Systems i.e. standards needed for complex systems of interacting equipment and processes (Cerni 1984, Hack 1987)

What is standardization?
Standardization is a belief that the market has the ability to understand and chart a valid future direction through the use of collective wisdom, to understand the impact of change on itself, and to adjust to that change.
(Cargill 2001)

Developing anticipatory standards
The group developing the standard may come to resemble an R&D effort; Standardization does not mean choosing among artifacts, instead, it includes product development (Cowan 1992)
Increasing role of non-governmental organizations
standards development organizations (Brenner and Spivak 2001)
consortia (Updegrove 1995, Weiss and Cargill 1992)

Why consortia form
Specialized organizations (Cargill 2002)
Following transaction cost theory (Williamson 1985)
Joining consortia to produce public goods (Garcia 2005)
Following rational actor theories (Olson 1997)
Isomorphism pressures (Egyedi 2000)
Following institutional theory (Powell and DiMaggio 1991)
Bridging structural holes (Garcia and Kale 2006)
Following network structures in industries (Burt 2005)
Societal actors making choices (Hartswood et al 2002)
Following social construction of technology (Bijeker 1995)

Research Questions
What causes an ICT standard to be what it is?
RQ 1 – Is it possible to identify a theoretical basis that may (inadvertently) underpin the design of ICT standards?
RQ 2 – How does the ICT standards development process (really) play out in standards development organizations?

Agenda for this talk
Web services: fundamentals
Web services: standards
Web services: standardizing
Recap, next steps, and Q&A

Web services
Web service
software reachable via a URI
public interfaces and defined bindings
discoverable by other software systems
others may interact as prescribed
Needed
Anticipatory standards (Cargill 1989)
Integrated (inter-operability) standards (Cerni 1984)
Fundamentals Standards Standardization

Research Questions

Web service standards
Piecemeal
Ad hoc
Overlapping
Complex

A theoretical basis
Language-Action Perspective (LAP)
Communicating to achieve organizational goals (Flores and Ludlow 1980)
Theories of language and communicative action (Goldkuhl and Lyytinen 1982)
Coordinator (Winograd and Flores 1986), SAMPO (Auramaki et al. 1988) , Action Workflow (Medina-Mora et al. 1992) , DEMO (Dietz 1994)

LAP-inspired framework Fundamentals Standards Standardization Preconditions for communicative acts: Channel (conduit to carry messages), Messaging (common syntax and semantics), and Guarantee (ensuring delivery without distortion) Communication Platform Creating commitments between communicating parties: Capability exposure, Capability search, Proposal negotiation, Contract establishment Communicative Act Emerges out of the performance of patterns of communicative acts: Exchange, Transaction, Relationship management, Concurrent contracts Rational Discourse

Assessing the Initiatives Fundamentals Standards Standardization

Implications Assertion Design is an important element of IT standards Gaps “ Conversations” “ Negotiations” Established Part of Communicative act Established Communication platform Fundamentals Standards Standardization

Research Questions

Standardization processes
A socio-technical process (adapted from Moen 1998)
Identifying the problem, Communicating information about the problem, Sharing perspectives about the problem, Discussing various, possibly conflicting approaches to problem solving, Compromising to develop an agreement, Deciding what the agreement covers and its specifics
Two-step reactive process (Cargill 1989)
Three interdependent phases (McCallum 1994)
Six-stage model (Reilly 1994)
New five stage-model (Cargill 1995)
NIST Best Practices Workshop Model (NIST 1993)
US Tech. Adv. Group for Jt. Tech. Committee (1995)

The W3C process
Principles
Open
Transparent
Responsive
Impartial
Encourages
Vendor neutrality
Member participation
Public participation
Coordination
Consensus
Focus of Study Archaeological Analysis Fundamentals Standards Standardization

Recall: ‘standardization’
Standardization is a belief that the market has the ability to understand and chart a valid future direction through the use of collective wisdom , to understand the impact of change on itself, and to adjust to that change.
(Cargill 2001)

Theoretical perspective Attaching meaning to design alternatives Agreeing between designs, fixing the actor network Creating and choosing design alternatives Fundamentals Standards Standardization Sense-making Design Negotiation DSN (Fomin et al. 2004)

Research method
Archaeological analysis
Use of public documents
Phone/ meeting records
Content Analysis
Coding
92 (94) code categories
Hermeneutic units created using Atlas.ti Fundamentals Standards Standardization An example (off-line) http://www.w3.org/2000/xp/Group/0/12/f2f-minutes 120 SOAP 40 3 3 3 Docs WS-Addr 81.75% 77.37% 3 53.95% 46.05% 2 45.23% 13.28% 1 Agreed + Negotiated Agreed Round

Study scope
Standardization process investigated for
SOAP Version 1.2 (Communication Platform, Messaging)
WS-Addressing (Communication Platform, Guarantee)
Submission to W3C Becomes W3C Note WG formed, Meetings begin Becomes W3C Recommendation 2000 2001 2002 2003 Analysis done Analysis ongoing http://www.w3.org/Submission/2000/05/ 18 April 2000 http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-SOAP-20000508/ 08 May 2000 http://www.w3.org/TR/soap/ 24 June 2003 13 Sept 2000 11 Oct 2000 24 June 2003 Fundamentals Standards Standardization SOAP 1.2 Results ►

I won’t budge! Without considering behaviors with multiple codes Interpretation : Actors do not engage in sense-making as much as they do in design and negotiation. They anticipate own role and stance to remain stable. Fundamentals Standards Standardization

Big pockets dictate outcomes! During the meeting Prior to the meeting Interpretation : The process is significantly influenced by design contributions from participants, who can expend significant resources for designing parts of the standard under development. This may question openness of the process. Fundamentals Standards Standardization

Design by committee? Not! Interpretation : A significant amount of design may be occurring outside the W3C meetings, and may compromise transparency of the process. Fundamentals Standards Standardization

Design ‘as’ negotiation Interpretation : The overlap between design and negotiation suggests that Design activities may replace other forms of negotiation behaviors. Fundamentals Standards Standardization Assertion Design is an important element of IT standards

Roles people play …
Advocate
My primary goal for … When we have a spec, we need a way to sell to the community. The … will be the tool I use for that. We should not put it on the back burner
Architect
Proposal: delete the box and replace it with …X: The envelope is the frame in which the headers hang, but the envelope is…Y: It's a mistake to try to distinguish … from …
Critic
raises the issue that an xml file server which may not want to take responsibility for normalizing data it has received. The issue was raised that this happened because xml was used for the envelope – a suggestion is made to not use the word header …

Roles people play
Facilitators
So there is a separate decision to be made about whether we need correlation ids and how and if we use our extensibility mechanism.… X: Let's take this to e-mail.
Guru
X: The envelope is the frame in which the headers hang, but the envelope is…‘Guru’ avatar: It's a mistake to try to distinguish … from …
Procrastinator
Chair: Postpone this agenda item due to X's (Procrastinator avatar) absence
Bystander

Recap
Can LAP provide an adequate theoretical basis?
Can DSN help understand how standards are developed?

SIG @ IST @ PSU
Standards Interest Group
J. Bagby (Law)
P. Mitra (Computer Science)
S. Purao (Information Systems)
http://standards.ist.psu.edu

Q + A
[email_address]
S. Purao et al. Influences on ICT standardization. Working paper .
K. Umapathy, S. Paul, S. Purao , J. Bagby, and P. Mitra, Forthcoming. Avatars of Participants in Anticipatory Standardization Processes. Book Chapter in Standards Edge Series by Sun Microsystems .
K. Umapathy, S. Purao. 2007. A theoretical investigation of emerging standards for web services. Information Systems Frontiers . Vol. 9, Pp. 119-134.
J. Bagby, S. Purao, P. Mitra. 2006. Standards Development, Disruptive Innovation and the Nature of Participation: Lock-In, Lock-Out, Holdup. Telecom Policy Research Conference .
K. Umapathy, S. Purao . 2006. Designing Enterprise Solutions with Web Services and Integration Patterns. IEEE Service Computing Conference (SCC). Chicago, IL, pp. 111-118.
P. Mitra, S. Purao , J. W. Bagby, K. Umapathy, and S. Paul. 2005. An Empirical Analysis of Development Processes for Anticipatory Standards, NET Institute Paper #05-18.
K. Umapathy, S. Purao . 2004. Service-oriented Computing: An Opportunity for the Language-Action Perspective. Language Action Perspective Conference .
K. Umapathy, S. Purao , and V. Sugumaran. 2003. Facilitating Conversations among Web Services as Speech-act based Discourses. Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems (WITS) , pp. 85-90

Standards and Standardization - A Research Project

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