Standardization in Digital Services Delivery

Standardization delivers several important benefits. One of these benefits is improved operational efficiencies and reduced costs. Another is that standardization provides a basis for consumer protection.

Today several important services are delivered “digitally”. Examples of such services are travel and hospitality related bookings, various types of financial and payment services and various types of “helpdesk” or assistance services. The current scenario is one where there is no uniformity of user experience and almost no notion of interoperability or service level assurance. Take, for example, a typical phone-banking system implemented using IVR (interactive voice response) technology. Each bank has its own set of menu options. There is no way to get a quick overview of all menu options. More importantly there is no uniformity on how to access critical services like reporting a suspicious transaction or a lost card. Wait times are erratic and there is no record available to a consumer on how much time has been spent in waiting for various types of transactions.

Think of a situation where a traveler has missed a flight at an airport outside her country. Contacting a helpdesk and being placed on hold is a harrowing experience. A standardized system would allow the placing of a specific request with a call back facility that could be used in any such situation with any provider. The customer could possibly have an app that would allow the description of her situation and this app could make a request to any airline system IVR with a description of the problem and a call back option. These facilities could save a lot of time and money for callers who are on hold, often long distance. This would also allow providers to prioritize requests and deliver strict response time guarantees to a small set of critical requests.

We are moving towards a future where software robots will be increasingly deployed. These “bots” will receive information from various systems and initiate transactions in other systems. As an example imagine a digital assistant that is configured to receive bills and make payments against these bills. The digital assistant needs to be able to understand the format of a bill and then initiate a payment against it. Payment could possibly use one of a variety of available payment methods. Such digital assistants may even learn over time. They may be able to make decisions on how to deal with unusually large bills or how to deal with bills from a provider that the assistant has not dealt with before.

Our society is evolving into one where several autonomous systems interact with humans and other autonomous systems to collectively deliver a wide variety of important and valuable services. Failure to deliver these services with the right level of assurance can have significant negative consequences. In certain cases deficient service delivery may pose a hazard to human safety. There is an important emerging need to develop and implement standards for digital service delivery. These standards are needed not only to ensure technical interoperability and reliability, but also to ensure consumer protection and enable governance frameworks at the right level of accountability.