Dr. Piero DeSabbata

COIN EI/EC Services and standardisation issues

One of the first outcomes from the COIN project with respect to the implementation issues is the potential associated to the adoption of EI/EC services from the SMEs point of view. The problem in this area is however how to involve SMEs and to create a critical mass of industrial users, suitable to generate a successful overall exploitation strategy for the project.
The COIN project adopted the multipliers strategy to overcome the need of having a sufficient impact at SMEs, by involving organisations suitable to act as “intermediaries” between the project and their SMEs constituency not only from a business, but also from a technological IT point of view. The idea is that this will induce the adoption from the SMEs side once they realise that an entity they trust has analysed and approved the needed set of EI/EC services, on an impartial and on a “third party” approach, thus identifying a sort of local, “de facto” standard.
However, especially in the case of Value Chains and Value Networks working for instance, for a Large Corporate, the issue about whether the needed set of EI/EC services are compliant with existing systems and are standardised to avoid any possible malfunctioning and mis-integration among the interacting IT systems.
While the path to achieve a full recognition for being a standardised IT system is long and almost likely beyond the scope and duration of the project, it is believed within COIN that the project must proceed its developments being aware of the requirements relevant to standardisation issues may influence the full impact of the COIN Project at industrial level.
The objective of this task is to collect, analyse and frame all the potential implications which standardisation issues may use on the COIN Project and to assess them against the current development status of the COIN project.

The COIN Angel for this task is Dr. Piero de Sabbata.