For nearly all business entities, the ability to fully connect up the organization across people, processes, design, structures and strategies is always a work-in-progress, never worked upon to the fullest extent and rarely achieved without the most radical transformation.

I come up against the barriers to change caught up consistently in this lack of interoperability. So I have to bring it into this exploring ecosystem and platform designs posting views.

What do we miss in not having that connectivity? Recognizing silos of unconnected knowledge needs changing; we need to leverage all of our diversity and expertise. Do you really know your capabilities, competencies and capacities?

1. Focusing on making technology work across organizations, internally and externally, with partners that share a common purpose. Our need is to find new growth engines and, more, sustaining. business value. it is our understanding to make exchanges work to enable creativity, and we need technology across processes to talk to each other- called interoperability.
2. Uncertainty, fear of the unknown, reluctance to share and partner, or to mutually “pool” intellectual property or our research know-how in a shared collaborative effort is hard. We often hold onto our knowledge as our “source of power”, this we need to let go of and embrace a new way of believing, trusting and collaborating. We will gain far more than we lose.
3. We must ask the important questions and fully recognize the answer to “what do we do well? How can we leverage and build out from this?” Are we investing enough time in networking, exchanging insights or building relationships? Knowing our core capabilities, competencies, and capacities is essential.

Let’s tackle one tough one- interoperability makes or breaks much of what we struggle to do -exchange knowledge.

Now I do not want to get caught up in the “weeds” of definitions, challenges or issues relating to interoperability. Still, this need is essential if we want to achieve open connectivity to exchange data, thinking, dialogues etc.

So what’s interoperability?

Think of interoperability as how technologies function in conjunction with other technologies. Take email as that ability to communicate how email needs to work makes each system (Google, Thunderbird, Yahoo etc.) interoperable. We wouldn’t be able to send an email using Gmail to someone’s Thunderbird email account if it was not interoperable.

Thankfully we have a lot of open, available tools that enable interoperability.

APIs — application programming interfaces — allow people to use Google or Facebook, or Thunderbird logins to sign in to other companies websites. For example, Twitter data such as tweets, conversation threads and query language using an API.

Open APIs provide the ability for developers with access to proprietary software applications or web services and allow computer programs to ‘talk’ to one another so they can request and share information.

So interoperability is the design of things to work together, having to conform to operating standards to achieve compatibility and integration; they can extend, sync, share, and enable a common exchange and understanding between disparate systems.

Recognising the importance of interoperability

Efficient automated data sharing between applications, databases, and other computer systems is crucial throughout networked computerized systems.

It is difficult for organizations to resolve this sharing due to layering or hundreds of legacy systems written over time in different codes that hold “open sharing” back. This constrains system-to-system performance.

Achieving recognition of that interoperability, to make use and form of the four levels of interoperability: foundational, structural, semantic, and organizational can all become cross-cutting through technological innovations to ensure consent, security, and integrated workflows move smoothly between different groups.

When being discussed, open standards rely on a broadly consultative and inclusive grouping of all those holding a stake in recognising that a common standard is developed.

The difference discussed and debated of each competing system to establish the technical and economic merits, demerits and feasibility of a proposed common or standards protocol to get to a common position. This can take years and numerous meetings before the resulting common document is endorsed as a common standard.

Many organizations are dedicated to interoperability. They have in common that they want to push the development of the World Wide Web towards the semantic web. The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable.

We must not make the mistake of muddling interoperability with intraoperability that strictly focuses on operations within specific parameters. For example, it describes the exchange of data between systems that are fundamentally the same and generally developed by the same vendor (specialised and specific). There’s little need for custom extensions or working on opening up to extend beyond a given limited boundary.

Data exchange is difficult or limited if there is a lack of interoperability across partners due to different standards. This can be solved by having a network where the exchange between all providers and organizations builds upon their software those abilities to talk and exchange data. Often this is no easy task and can take significant time if data exchanges are complicated.

Improving interoperability includes standardization of terminology and normalization of data to those standards, which can be one of the fundamental blockages to why platform adoption still struggles.

The task is complex and needs significant orchestration and leadership to “set” these standards to achieve this potential interoperability.

Those that choose to collaborate become the natural ecosystem participants if the result provides a substantial advantage in advancing and unlocking complexity and communicating on common challenges and concepts of mutual value.