AIIM Standards Watch

Standards Week 2008

AIIM's Standards Week 2008 is now a piece of history. We had 7 committees hold meetings last week while we were in Boston for the AIIM Exposition and Conference. It was great to see so many friends.

Now for an overview of some of the activities of the week...

The US TAG (Technical Advisory Group) to ISO TC 171 held a meeting during which they reviewed the progress against commitments that had been made during the last ISO meeting in London. Significant progress is being made on all the tasks so that during the next meeting to be held in Beijing we will have very good discussions.

Implementation Guidelines - This committee began work on the next version of the popular ARP-1 document and discussed methods of getting additional adoption of the document and listed standards by the states.

iECM - The committee has many projects it is trying to work on. The focus of the committee will be on metadata. Given that there are many metadata projects being worked on by numerous groups, the committee discussed how to bring the work together to ensure that we do not have opposing efforts.

Evidentiary Support - This committee has been dormant for a while but is being revived to focus on record authenticity issues. It is being lead by Bob Williams, Cohasset and Paul Doyle, Proofspace and Sedona Group. They will be looking into producing some white papers and best practices as well as sharing evidentiary support information through blogs.

DIQP - The DIQP (Digital Image Quality and Preservation) committe heard presentations from Charles Dollar and Rick Laxman on preservation issues. Charles spoke on his ongoing research in the area and Rick shared what the Church's Family History Division is doing to preserve and provide access to their very old records.

C27 (Document Management) - In addition to discussions on various projects, this committee discussed the use of blu-ray disks for document imaging. As a result of the discussion, AIIM will be having a letter sent to OSTA, Optical Storage Technology Association, requesting that they focus on promoting the standardization of blu-ray disks.

PDF/UA (Universal Access) - The committee made good progress on their document and is planning to have it available before the meetings in Beijing which means they have a very aggressive committee meeting schedule to follow. They have made significant progress and feel it is now time to get other prespectives included in the standard.

While PDF Healthcare did not meet in Boston during Standards Week, they did hold their normally scheduled bi-weekly conference call.

We hope to see you at a Standards meeting soon!

StratML

AIIM's Standards Board recently agreed to add the StratML project to the AIIM Standards program of work. The first meeting of the committee is scheduled for January 10, 2008 beginning at 1:30 p.m. Eastern at the AIIM Headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland. (A draft agenda is attached to this message.) While a conference call has been established for the first meeting it is recommended to attend in person, if possible.

StratML is planned to be a standardized XML template and vocabulary for strategic plans, performance plans and performance reports in alignment with policies and standards. This standard will enable the sharing, referencing, indexing, discovery, linking, reuse and analysis of the elements of strategic plans including goal and objective statements. While the initial focus of StratML has been on the US Federal Government, it is believed that private organizations of all sizes will find value in the use of StratML as they draft planning documents.

AIIM Standards meetings are open to anyone who wishes to attend and is willing to actively participate in the development of the standard. Please let Ebony Dowtin at edowtin@aiim.org know if you will be attending the meeting on January 10, 2008 or if you would like to be added to the listserv for this committee so that you can follow the development progress. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact, Betsy Fanning at bfanning@aiim.org or Owen Ambur at owen.ambur@verizon.net.

State of Standards

As a part of the AIIM 2006 State of the Industry survey, survey respondents were asked several questions about standards. The results of the survey show that consensus standards development processes like those promoted by ANSI (American National Standards Institute), ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and the many other organizations continue to be important largely because they are fairly well-understood. Surprisingly, of the end user respondents of this survey only 19% were familiar with the W3C (Worldwide Web Consortium) and 10% were familiar with OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) both of which are fairly well known among the IT community. [Note: W3C is developing web based standards and OASIS is largely responsible for standards in the area of XML, HTML, SOA, etc.] This tells us that there is a growing understanding of XML, .NET and web services standards that ultimately supports the new importance that SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and interoperability play in end user plans to improve their businesses which supports AIIM's efforts in iECM. (More posts to come regarding iECM in the near future.)

Welcome

Welcome to the AIIM Standards Watch Blog. For those of you who have been a member of AIIM, you may remember an eNewsletter called Standards Watch where we helped to keep you current on standard for document imaging and management. This blog will attempt to do that same thing but on a much more real-time basis. Let's start with an introduction to AIIM Standards for those of you who may not know.

AIIM is an ANSI accredited standards development organization and has been for over 25 years. In addition to ANSI standards, AIIM holds the secretariat of an ISO Technical Committee and Subcommittee on behalf of ANSI for ISO TC 171, Document Management Applications and TC171 SC2, Application Issues. Our focus is on ECM or Enterprise Content Management Standards which includes document management, digital and analog image management, workflow and business process management and analysis, metadata, interoperability, PDF, and many other topics that we will discuss in this blog in future postings. In addition to ANSI and ISO standards, our program also develops AIIM Recommended Practices (ARP), fast-track specifications to help users gain a better understanding of the technology. All are welcome to participate on our committees (and we have many). For additional information on the committees and to find out how you can participate, please send an email to bfanning@aiim.org. We look forward to your participation as we shape the industry and help others to make better use of the ECM technologies. For more information on AIIM Standards, please visit http://www.aiim.org/standards.