In order to have an effective data network, you need to have a well thought out approach to bringing new partners onto the network, both in terms of providers of data and consumers of data.
One of the most important things to consider when adding participants to your network is standards. However, standards are a double-edged sword. You need to have agreed upon standards, but you also need to recognize that not everyone can adhere to the standards.
For instance, in our world, we often deal with UN Location codes, standard codes for many cities in the world. This is a well known standard, which we support. For partners coming on to the system, if they can understand UN Location codes, coming on-board is very easy. However, we need to recognize and handle exceptions: UN Location codes occasionally change, and some partners will still use the old codes; some cities do not yet have UN Location codes assigned; some partners use a competing standard (Schedule D/K); some partners use a completely proprietary standard. We need to exist in a world where things are often messier than we would prefer.
When partners can use standard codes, on-boarding is smooth and quick. The exceptions can cause some delay. However, we have designed our systems to handle the exceptions, and while handling partners who cannot use the standards will never be as quick as a “vanilla” on-boarding, we have tools to map customer specific codes into standard codes, etc., that help expedite these exceptions.
Locations are just one example of the messiness we need to handle every day. While we have learned how valuable standards are, we also know that deviations from standards are a way of life and we need to accept these. However, at the end of the day, we must ensure that when the data goes out to our customers, we have untangled this messiness and present the data to our customers in a normalized format they can digest. Therefore, though we build our systems around standards, we also have learned that we must build systems that can smoothly accept deviations from standards.
Posted by MartinS 
