What are the benefits and challenges of adopting common data standards in your industry or domain?

1 Benefits of data standards

Adopting common data standards in your industry or domain can offer several benefits, such as facilitating data sharing and integration, improving data quality and reliability, increasing data usability and accessibility, and enabling more efficient and effective data analysis. Common data standards can reduce errors, inconsistencies, and duplication, as well as make data easier to find, understand, and reuse. Furthermore, they support data discovery and interoperability, allowing data to be compared, aggregated, and synthesized. As a result, they can support data-driven insights and solutions for decision making.

2 Challenges of data standards

Adopting common data standards in your industry or domain can be a costly and complex endeavor, involving multiple stakeholders, systems, and data types, as well as requiring significant changes to existing data practices and infrastructure. It can also be challenging to coordinate and align these standards due to conflicting interests, preferences, or requirements among different data producers, users, and regulators. Additionally, data security and privacy risks may arise if the standards involve sensitive or personal data and do not comply with relevant laws, regulations, or ethical principles, or do not incorporate adequate data protection measures.

3 How to overcome barriers

To effectively adopt common data standards in your industry or domain, you should conduct an assessment of your data needs, goals, and capabilities. Engaging with stakeholders such as producers, users, regulators, and experts is also essential for gathering input and buy-in for data standardization initiatives. Additionally, adopting or adapting existing data standards is recommended to save time and resources. Implementing the standards incrementally and iteratively is also advised, along with monitoring and evaluating their performance. Lastly, ensuring data security and privacy by following the principles of data minimization, anonymization, encryption, and consent is paramount for compliance with applicable laws, regulations, and ethical standards.

4 Examples of data standards

To demonstrate the advantages and difficulties of embracing common data standards in your sector or domain, here are some examples from different areas and fields. Health Level Seven (HL7) standards can improve patient care, safety, and outcomes by allowing interoperability and integration of health data. However, they can be complex and expensive to implement and maintain, as well as posing risks to patient privacy. Common Education Data Standards (CEDS) can help improve education quality, equity, and accountability by enabling data sharing and comparison across different states and agencies. Yet, they can be hard to match with existing state and local data systems and policies, as well as raising concerns about student data security and privacy. The Environmental Data Standards Council (EDSC) is a collaborative effort to create and promote data standards for environmental information. They can help improve environmental management, protection, and sustainability by allowing data exchange and analysis across different environmental domains and disciplines. Nevertheless, they can be difficult to develop and implement due to the diversity and complexity of environmental data and stakeholders, as well as presenting risks to data quality and reliability.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?