PESC EdUnify Task Force Launched

Summary

On December 17th and 18th, about 30 PESC members and interested parties gathered in Washington DC to launch the PESC EdUnify Task Force.  Representatives from all sectors were engaged as we discussed the business and technical challenges to launch such an initiaitve.  I am most thankful for Steve Wheat from Emory and Ed Hauser from SunGard Higher Education as project chairs.  And, Michael Sessa for making all the arrangements.  Our breakout sessions were very productive and the volunteers to continue working on the use cases was fantastic.  Next up, we will be sending out an annoucement inviting interested parties to participate in the Proof of Concept (POC).  We anticipate having a conference call in January 2010 after the holidays.  Meanwhile, Ed, Steve, Michael and I will continue having our weekly friday calls preparing and orchestrating the next steps of the Task Force.

Business Discussion

Presently it is hard to access data across higher education. Data interchange standards are not widely implemented by vendors, academic institutions, and government agencies. Where standards are implemented they are not registered or documented in an infrastructure that allows them to be readily used by people building integrations and looking for data. EdUnify infrastructure will allow vendors, academic institutions, and government agencies to register their data interchange specifications and implementations and map them to standard termininology for interoperability. Users of EdUnify will be able to use this registry and vocabulary services to build integrations, inventory services, and access data across higher education. PESC is the right organization to undertake this effort, because it is a neutral party with a track record of success in developing and implementing standards.

My intention is to stimulate discussion by putting some thoughts together that some may feel are provacative.  I have done this on purpose, because as stakeholders across education, we often get lost in our own self interests and lose focus on helping students succeed.  That is not a one time event or, in most cases, a period of time spent at one institution.  Students span institutions and the enrollment implications impose requirements on data stores and systems not contemplated by current technologies.

The motivation to control's one destiny is emboddied in how every organization priorities, invests and leverages the investment in information technologies. Every organization has their own proprietary interests reflected in their desire to sustain and grow their business, either for profit or driven by mission to serve their community of interests. Which, on the surface sounds selfish, but is realistic.

Integration and interface technologies are haunted by incompatibities.  Data stores, a key asset within information systems are built limiting scope and resources.  As such, integration and interface technologies are usually left off the requirements list.  As a backdrop, we also must consider how we generally drive our actions as noncomformists and don't like to be told how to do something, when to do it and what to do. So, we often do it our way.  The not invented here syndrome often followed across education rears its head when system decisions are made based upon subtle inferences that solutions often don't exactly fit requirements, thus justifying developing alternatives or customizing systems so they loose their compatability.  The difficult challenge to address the benefits of sharing data and methods across applications highlights the costly potholes as we travel along the road. It requires us to think out side the box.  How can we overcome the natural and human proprietary leanings and aversions to sharing?  The potholes are everywhere. 

In school, we would penalize a student for cheating if they copied off a peer. It saves them work obviously. We are socialized to think it is bad and we would penalize students severely for any infraction. In business, in general, it is reflected everyday in how we look to each other to see insights and to validate our thinking. We often realize it is a compliment that someone copies one's work on one level, but also how our competitive spirit would naturally hide our proprietary interests, ideas and property to avoid the public and the risk of copy. The internet and web reveals how easy it is to copy content, pictures and we rationalize it by how much time it saves us, how it improves how we can make our powerpoints leap out from the screen or how we can leverage the knowledge we gain access to because someone else posts and maintains it.

Governments attempt to help address these issues through patent and copyright registration. Which, as an example of a registry and lookup, shows that even having the ability to register one's intellectual property, the resistance, extra effort and costs to do so, reduces the effectiveness of patent and copyright protection because the information becomes public allowing others to copy or mimic. The difference though is the IP in the case of the EdUnify Registry and Lookup is not made public.  Only the front door or window is available for public view.  The actual IP behind the walls is still not exposed.  Whereas in the case of Copyright and Patent registration, the actual documents are stored and made available. 

Yet, the business reasons why organizations and people in general hide and protect the investments in information technologies is reinforced by the fears and anxieties of competition and misstrust that things will be copied. Why should we expose the front door or address to our proprietary technology so others can see them? Proprietary data and application services are often strategic and tactical competitive advantages. And, thus attempting to persuade an organization, managed by people, to publish what they consider their IP is doomed to fail if we attempt to force compliance or rule. Still, EdUnify is not collecting and publishing IP.  It is just collecting and providing a directory of services offered like a phone book lists telephone numbers and street addresses.  The actual details of the services (what is located at the address) are described to allow query and search, but the guts of how a method call works and what it provides (the value) is abstracted by the web service, protecting the actual IP and effort invested in the technology.

Exposing connections also offers the opportunties to drive business and value we can't see today. What do I mean? The internet, like other major revolutionary ideas has created new markets and approaches to business we never would have dreamed of just a few short years ago. Who would have thought someone would be interested in Tweating or Digging? Who would have thought Facebook would have captured such a huge population of users exposing, poking and messaging? Who would have thought wiki's and blogs would be used to support collabortive processes like EdUnify and enabling us all to be publishers and consumers of our ideas?

This is why we need to develop and reinforce a market driven approach, which will leverage why people and organizations will allow for reuse, copy and sharing of practices, automated services and common data defintions. Doing so has to be in their proprietary interests. Trying to force it or expect it will never happen. Yet, similar to movements of open source and shareware, one has to think about the potential outside the interface points. The interface points are connections, and like connecting cities with roads or websites with links, the connections offer value. Connections between governments or between communities are hard to do, because they must deal with the natural byproduct of the effort we put forth to differentiate and be the best. No one wants to be the worst or last on the list. So, we must leverage the competitive spirit in all of us.

In banking, the ATM network allows consumers to connect to their bank anywhere in the world. On the web, Amazon allows a consumer to connect to many sellers of the same product competing on price, service and delivery. In music, musicans post music tracks for free to allow consumers to sample thru iTunes or other outlets. Comcast OnDemand provides free and for fee movies. Photo repositoies offer free and for fee pictures with various options to deliver their value. Credit cards allow consumers to post a charge and pay later. The fee to pay over time versus pay by due is their business model.

In transportation, air, car, train, boats, bikes, and walking offers the means to get from point A to point B with different benefits of speed, energy and price. The point is, connections bring value and expose new ways to bring value to consumers. EdUnify is not the connection or the service or the data delivered by a service. It is only the means to register and find connections. Which then says, if you have a connection that brings value, which one would assume some will have and others won't, why not advertise it and promote it?

If one would build a website and had no one visit it, I would guess you would think that would be silly and a waste of effort. Why do it? But, if one advertised it and drove traffic to it, one would expect the reasons motivated to expose information about one's beliefs, mission, products, services, etc. are driven by commercial or personal reaons. These drivers reflect the natural reasons why all organizations developing information systems and services will eventually utilize the registry and lookup to promote and access data and method connections that are obscured today. EdUnify is a channel like the website domain does for holder enabling the publication of information that will drive business. Business is what this is all about.

Come join the effort to unify access to data and methods across education to help students succeed.  EdUnify is simply a registry and lookup service, publishing the entry door to electronic services.  As such, the data and methods are under the control of who offers the service, reinforcing practices and policies established.  Please checkout http://www.pesc.org/ for more information or to join the Task Force.