Electronic messaging has seen many initiatives in the last 40 years.  As a result, the arrival of a new messaging standard on the scene is nothing new.  After all, the UN introduced EDIFACT in the 70's for all sorts of messages, from forecast orders, to payment advices, and that standard is still going strong today.  About 3 years ago I worked on a project with HSBC who mandated that we use exactly that, a EDIFACT D96A PAYMUL standard message!  Before the EDIFACT standard was commonplace, the world was scattered with point to point solutions, and IT maintenance headaches.

The world of XML is no different.  Early supply chain initiatives agreed to use XML as the message protocol, but XML is a language which allows you to write your own grammar, but which one?  Nestle, Danone, Henkel etc grouped together to form a new standard, xCBL (sound familiar?).  This process started off by numerous consultants and representitives of the founding partners getting into a room and defining a set of messages that covered every possible scenario that one could encounter in a supply chain that each could imagine.  The result was confusion, differences emerged over one definition or another ("does Delivery Time mean the time it takes for delivery or the time it is delivered?!"), whilst others squabbled that their requirements were special and couldn't be defined in a message, that their business was "unique".

The accounting world is experiencing the same troublesome birthing process right now.   The new messaging standards are rocking established processes, and making accountants really think about what they send to HMRC now that the information will be used for purposes beyond the current PDF that they send.  With this comes standardisation of the type mentioned above, semantic definitions are more important than ever, and there will be a mind shift to greater standardization of accounts filing.

 We welcome the introduction of a standard, when, being in the system integration space as we are, it makes life a whole lot simpler.