Retirement parties are rarely little more than an embarrassing speech from the boss, a few confessions, presentation of the collective gift, followed by a quick dash to the nearest bar.

Invitations to such events rarely come as a surprise.   Predictions of the retirement of Tom Warner have, however, been about as reliable as the UK’s long-range weather forecasts.  Now it’s really happening.  Life for nearly all of us will never be quite the same again.  Tom Who?   Tom X/12, Tom EDIFACT, Tom ebXML, Tom the eBusiness standards guy. 

In the arcane world of international standards development there’s a deep-seated paradox – the outstanding heroes are the guys who don’t stand out.   They get on with the job without regard for fame or fortune.  Tom Warner, retiring this month from Boeing in St Louis, is a classic example.

For at least twenty years, and possibly longer, Tom has been at the heart of standards development.  With his ebXML colleagues the impacts of their work have benefited far more than the aerospace sector.  The evolution from early EDI formats to complex ebXML transactions has enabled virtually all of the joined-up on-line business that we do every day.  Systems interoperability at the application level is a vastly bigger business than bar-codes.  In the late 80’s Tom even spent a couple of years in the UK on secondment to BT to help develop what would eventually be called eCommerce and then eBusiness.

But few of us make any direct contribution to the creation of standards.  Mostly our businesses are just grateful that some folks (usually sponsored by major manufacturers) have sorted this stuff out.   ‘Ay there’s the rub’.  Our collective apathy, our willingness to let others work it out, leads directly to the sort of corporate warfare that has so badly delayed real innovations such as the development of things like fully mobile broadband.  All manner of incumbent and aspiring vested interests clash in international forums where the rules never envisaged that companies would throw money at packing the votes.

The industries that made the fastest progress were those like aerospace where the collective interests of enterprise users (not the IT manufacturers) were in the driving seat.   But in our world of generic telecoms technology the only representatives of business consumers are regulators who would prefer to keep their hands clean.   A policy of technology neutrality doesn’t just mean a degree of lofty independence – it can also mean not caring very much to intervene until there’s clear evidence that it’s all gone horribly wrong. 

The question for all of us in the industry and the UK government is whether there’s a collective willingness to invest in innovation by supporting the sort of long-term dedicated work undertaken by the Tom Warners.  Do we leave this to manufacturers to find their own consensus without enterprise consumer input?   With lots of international travel it’s expensive and long-term but can we afford not to be involved?

St Louis is, alas, way too far to go for a retirement party and anyway it’s on the same day as an Ofcom half-day seminar to discuss consumer choice issues arising from Ethernet-based FTTH schemes. Very interesting for UK enterprises with remote workers – and, apparently, the Autumn weather is quite nice in Geneva.

This editorial was first published in Comms Business magazine, October 2007.

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