Challenges in the field of B2B standardisation

The competitive business world has changed considerably thanks to the globalisation of the market. Business contacts are being established all over the world, without regard for the previous limitations of space or time. However, global business faces great inter-operability challenges, e.g. how to enable collaborating businesses to communicate and exchange information in a flexible and secure manner. One approach in Business-to-Business (B2B) ecommerce is to use a communication standard, which is a mechanism used to create and exchange documents between organisations, where the document structure and the contained information is in a format that can be understood and possibly automatically processed by organisations’ system software. In standardisation, several roles have emerged, of which this paper deals with two – the standards researcher (referred to as the theoretical view) and the standards developer (referred to as the practice view), in comparing their views on positive and negative aspects of standards. Results show that both views agree more or less on the positive aspects, while there are considerable differences in the negative aspects. Aspects mentioned fall into three categories: standards content; standards development; and standards use. From the discussion, four challenges for future B2B standards work could be identified.