My view of standards is no secret. I’ve been listening to and involved in standards for the better part of four years. And it’s not because I’m a standards geek. It’s based on an aggregation of the stated wants and needs of the financial institutions.

And I organize all those wants and needs into a core hypothesis. And that is that precise and unique identification of the three critical attributes – namely financial instruments, legal entities and data elements are the foundation of effective data management. Get the foundation right because that’s what everything else can and should be built from.

The case is compelling as it relates to data element identification. There are hundreds of data elements, delivered by an equal number of sources - making it hard to compare data, hard to automate business processes, hard to exchange data, hard to feed models, hard to create consistent benchmarks and resulting in a never ending process of mapping and cross referencing.

I’m suggesting it is time to fix this challenge. I believe it’s possible to fix this challenge. And I believe that we’re pretty close – so that the task isn’t really that hard.

However, there are some requirements. The financial institutions as a coordinated body needs to lay down the collective gauntlet that you want it to happen – and happen in the short run. Financial institutions need to make sure the requirements are stated with some degree of precision. If you don’t make it completely clear what you want, the chance of you getting it (in your lifetime) is close to zero. And you need to leverage your combined clout and insist on accountability and project delivery (i.e. the same process you use to manage every other project within your own shops).

Now I realize that no one likes to talk about standards in polite company. And I understand why. The process is shrouded in mystery … usually spoken by people with strange accents … with an ungodly amount of unnecessary bureaucracy … using lots of code words and numeric tags … with little accountability … in a process that seems never ending … with little practical output … and nothing in terms of project plans, delivery milestones or process transparency.

That being said, I don’t understand why you financial institutions tolerate it when in fact you own the governance, it’s your problem to fix and the benefits of doing it right are significant.

Now it could be that I’ve misread the importance and I’m certainly open to hearing that’s the case. But we’ve certainly got enough validation that we’re pursuing these activities with alacrity. And will continue to do so until you tell us to stop wasting your time.

With all that as backdrop – I am bursting with optimism and have mostly good news to report. And I’d like to start by uttering some bad words – namely ontology, taxonomy, symbology and metadata management. These are not words I suggest we use when trying to sell this concept – but among us data geeks it might be OK.

Let me continue by confessing my sins. Back in 1997 a bunch of financial institutions got together to try to standardize the terms and definitions of reference data. And I was one of those hired to defeat the initiative – which we did. The problem was the financial institutions also wanted to standardize values and the vendors (that hired us) didn’t like that.

In 1999 the same financial institutions came back to the industry and wanted to try again – this time leaving out the standardization of values. The problem was that the discussion was being facilitated by a bunch of technologists who were all enamored with a new processing technology know as XML. So instead of listening to the requirements of the firms and creating standard data ontology, we produced an XML schema. Lots of effort, wrong objective.

In 2004 we all tried again. This time I was helping to lead the charge and we went to ISO and got absorbed into the