SIO offers consultancy and training services to provide short term benefits in design, requirements and integration specifications in any outsourcing or software project

In the medium term, the effort accumulates a library of best practice within the organisation for future projects

When shared across the sector, best practice transforms into sector-wide standards for interoperability

Contributions and access to the library is by subscription

SIO is producing tooling that will enable OIS specifications to be crowd-sourced across territories and organisations, without hands on consultancy from SIO

Tooling will support development of both common and Proprietary OIS Contracts and will be available as part of the subscription service

SIO takes responsibility for quality control of contributed material. It  curates the body of common standards in each sector and this body of work gives OIS constancy and endurance, even beyond the lifetime of SIO itself

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Market Engagement Model

The Value of an External Authority

Only an independent, authoritative approach to operations can deliver true operational excellence

SIO is free from in-sector competitive pressure

Standard InterOperations' mission is to develop a body of expertise that systematically covers the operations of a market sector; such as telecoms, healthcare, government and armed forces. The method is to capture the know-how of Subject Matter Experts using consistent principles and an ever-developing architecture. The resulting library endures beyond the churn in consultants, strategists and executives in any individual organisation

SIO Quality Control ensures consistency and general applicability of OIS Contracts. This is achieved by ensuring conformance to the OIS methodology, which covers factor such as granularity, data, delegation and encapsulation. Other aspects of quality control involve ensuring 

• there is no duplication, 
• that naming conventions are clear and common 
• there is sufficient coverage of operations in the sector

Solutions and Business Process designers generate designs by sequencing OIS Contracts. These define supply chains, both internally and between organisations. 

System  functions and features are fully defined by OIS Contracts. OIS finally unites the operations, business processes and systems by using the language of operations

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Innovation

OIS encourages the small, new innovative organisations to develop a presence in a sector

All organisations have equal opportunity  to promote their offerings through conformance to OIS standards, 

irrespective of size or maturity of the business

OIS places any new market offering into a business and operational context

making clear the value  

The vendor can show the Contracts that are added, replaced and enhanced by their offering and the interaction with other Contracts in the a solution

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The value of sharing

The greatest challenge for OIS is the often default position for any organisations to consider all their activities to be a commercial secret. At the same time, organisations fail to nurture those secrets, by leaving them inaccessible in the personal experience of business-critical Subject Matter Experts, where they cannot be claimed as intellectual property. Those experts are kept too busy to document, or refine their expertise

The truth is a very high proportion of operations are the same, common, commodity activities found in all similar organisations and only varying in detail. There are two big challenges for organisations:

1. There is little opportunity to reduce cost and encourage innovation through convergence and reuse
2. The genuinely valuable trade secrets are lost among all the common material

SIO is well positioned to help establish a norm for what is best contributed to the common standards and what should remain proprietary

The ideal situation is where an organisation recognises certain operational activities are necessary, but non-the-less not differentiating. They contribute these to the common OIS and in so doing, help other organisations come to the same conclusion and drive towards convergence, reuse and off-the-shelf support

Alternatively, SIO Consultancy is able to recognise those operations that are effectively the same from organisation to organisation of the ones it works with and can encourage sharing

Genuinely differentiation activities that should be kept as trade secrets, can be modelled as Proprietary OIS Contracts. Doing so means they are recorded and can be formally secured  as intellectual property. They are also available to be used, built on and automated

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The OIS Library...for each Sector

SIO offers sector-specific membership to access and contribute to the OIS Contract library

The Common standards are available to all, but access to Proprietary OIS Contracts and features are restricted to the owners and to their declared partners

OIS Contracts can be extended to produce more sophisticated, more specific, or feature enhanced Contracts. The results are likely to be proprietary, but the intention is to fold them back into the common standards when it becomes more valuable for the owners to do so

Models of Contribution

1. Experts from different organisations and different territories in a sector work together to crowd source shared best practice. This generates Common OIS Contracts
2. Organisations work internally across different divisions and different territories to consolidate and refine their differential value. This generates Proprietary OIS Contracts
3. Organisations work together as partners to enhance OIS Contracts with shared differentiating features. Client, supplier, or both organisations may enhance the specifications to include their own differentiating value

Standard InterOperations maintains and curates the libraries on behalf of its members