Internal Edi Groups

There are industry-wide standards for ElectronicDocumentInterchange?, including the ANSI X.12 standards and related XML schemas.

Just a random thought that's been bothering me recently:

I do find it interesting how the presence of an official EDI group in a corporation always seems to strongly discourage the use of EDI standards within that corporation. You'd think or even hope it would have the opposite effect, but what I've observed is that because EDI gateway software can translate industry standard messages into whatever internal proprietary formats you find convenient, people seem to assume that you must translate all industry standard messages into arbitrarily non-standard internal proprietary formats. In the absence of existing internal formats, people seem to feel compelled to dream up new non-standard formats so that the EDI gateway will have something to translate to. "Keeps them employed" I say.

Sometimes I fantasize that if I had the authority to talk to these groups and to design the file format they give me, I'd first ask them not to mangle the customers data; "please do no translation." If they insisted on doing translation, I'd insist that they translate the EDI messages to conform to the real industry EDI standards. I've yet to see an EDI message that fully conforms to the written industry standards.

To use industry standards, the documentation of the industry standard file formats would have to be made available to application developers within the organization. This has proven to be an issue in some companies.

Industry standards are a good thing. But there are certainly strong barriers that must be overcome before we can use them.