At June 18th 2009, the CEN/ISSS E-invoice Phase II held an open meeting in Brussels. The purpose of this meeting was to present the public with the more or less final results based on the objectives of this Phase II workshop:
An adoption programme for increased electronic invoicing in European business processes.
1. Compliance of electronic invoice implementations with Council Directive 2001/115/EC and the national legislation regarding electronic invoices;
2. Cost effective authenticity and integrity of electronic invoices and related business documents regardless of formats and technologies;
3. Implementation of compliant electronic invoice systems in using emerging technologies and business processes;
4. A framework for the emerging network infrastructure of ‘invoice operators’ throughout Europe.
See also: CEN/ISSS E-invoice final deliverables June 18th – What to expect?
Taking the stand
Before we get to the impact of the results presented I would like to make some statements:
1. Performing an evaluation is not a bad thing: it provides items for improvement
2. To criticize certain aspects of proceedings of this workshop is not a bad thing either. Really, it is not, as long as it is being done in a fair way. Nevertheless I can imagine that some are not very amused with this article. To those I would like to say: it is not personal (no it is not!) and it is an attempt to amend. The definition of the verb amend is: to change in order to improve.
3. Being a chair of working group 5 for some months had no effect on the outcome of this tiny evaluation. It just provided a valuable insight in the proceedings of this workshop.
4. UPDATE: Criticising certain aspects does not mean that one’s right. This also applicable to comments of course.
Evaluation
The time has come to put the CEN/ISSS E-invoice Phase II through its paces.
1. First and foremost, the CEN/ISSS E-invoice Phase II has been spectacularly interesting as it until now is the oldest and largest initiative on a pan European level that provides a podium for e-invoicing experts to share knowledge information on a frequent basis. From that perspective, the CEN/ISSS E-invoice Phase II should earn the mark ‘outstanding’.
2. Another interesting point is that the CEN/ISSS E-invoice Phase II is open for everyone – free of charge – without an obligation to perform a contribution. That is a good thing but not outstanding as it creates quite a lot of overhead and reduces the active participation to a small amount of participants. Therefore, the mark ‘good’.
3. Quality over quantity. Or should it be the other way around? The CEN/ISSS E-invoice Phase II propagates to have the largest European community in e-invoicing. I wish to object against this statement.
First, the amount of active participants in the CEN/ISSS E-invoice Phase II is limited to a fraction of the total amount of participants in the workshops and working groups. It is like Twitter: you have active participants that ‘tweet’ and those who listen. Secondly, the EXPP Summit has a far larger community of experts (both on a theoretical and practical level) than this workshop has. Nevertheless, the frequency of the EXPP Summit is a lot lower. The EEI Platform has a far larger community (online that is) reaching 1.000 readers with its biweekly e-mail newsletter alone. Fourth, there are several other communities that can rival with the CEN/ISSS E-invoice Phase II community claim.
So, when it comes to the community size of the CEN/ISSS E-invoice Phase II, we could give it the mark sufficient. When looking at the amount of active participants (which are not all the names that are put on the CWA’s!) another mark might come into mind.
From now on it becomes a little bit prickly. Please, take a look at ‘taking the stand’ above again.
1. The phrase CWA is an abbreviation for Common CEN Workshop Agreement. A document with this is positioned a set of rules that has been commonly agreed upon. A document can only become a CWA when it has been created by a set of experts and after a public consultants.
From a technocratic point of view, the documents presented in Brussels at June 18th 2009 could theoretically all become a CWA. Theoretically because we could first of all ask ourselves whether some of the documents have enough objective quality. In some cases the –commercial- interest of some participants (experts) may have exceeded the urge to create real added value based on objective expert information. Yes, this is criticism of some sort, please note ‘taking the stand’ above yet another time. Please. Do.
Also and again from a technocratic point of view, we could ask ourselves whether the amount of active participation could turn a document up to a possible CWA level. Even with public consultation. Do the workshop, working group and consultation proceedings automatically convert documents into CWA’s?
Let’s accept the current CWA creating and adoption process. What is the value of the CWA’s produced in both Phase I and II. Are they being used on a large and repetitive basis? By service providers? By organisations? How do they help the use and adoption of e-invoicing in the European Union and its Member States?
So, evaluating the current documents we could ask ourselves whether they should automatically to be turned into CWA’s. Looking at the amount of active participants, the practical usage for organisations, service providers and other common stakeholders, I would like to give it the mark ‘sufficient’. Why- because one deliverable that stands out will be discussed in the next point.
2. The CEN/ISSS –and also E-invoice Phase II- aims at technical standardisation. The objectives of the CEN/ISSS E-invoice Phase II however seem to have little to do with technical standardisation. For instance, the objective:
”An adoption programme for increased electronic invoicing in European business processes”
leads to a website called the e-invoice gateway (which has been heavily promoted by the EEI Platform). But the most striking difference between the main objective of technical standardisation is obviously the deliverable based on the Phase II objective:
”Compliance of electronic invoice implementations with Council Directive 2001/115/EC and the national legislation as regards electronic invoices”
which leads to the Draft Good Practice Guideline. Mind you, this is a very important piece of work that can easily become a CWA and should be used by fiscal authorities all over the world. But it just has not anything to do with technical standardisation. It is the standardisation of a legal and fiscal aspect of e-invoicing. And yes, of course it has technical implementations (including the user interface of the Excel sheet). But technical standardisation issues – if any – are difficult to discover. Again we advice you to read ‘taking the stand’ above yet once more.
So when it comes to the amount of technical standardisation we can put a score to each deliverable:
- Phase II deliverable 1 – website e-invoice gateway
technical standardisation: no
CWA: no
- Phase II deliverable 2 – e-invoicing compliance guidelines
technical standardisation: no
CWA: yes!
- Phase II deliverable 3 – business process and technology assessment guide
technical standardisation: no
CWA: yes?
- Phase II deliverable 4 – Emerging network infrastructure of eInvoice service providers
technical standardisation: yes?
CWA: yes?
Keeping in mind that a Phase III is being planned we could ask ourselves whether the expected Phase II deliverables and objectives are not exceeding at least the mandate of this workshop or CEN/ISSS for that matter. Moreover we should better discuss interoperability rather than standardisation which for some are on other sides of the spectrum.
For instance, take a look at the Stork project that deals with e-identity. This project just delivered:
- Framework Mapping of Technical/Organisational Issues to a Quality Scheme
- Report on Legal Interoperability EU: STORK project Deliverable – Quality authenticator scheme
- Interim Report on eID Process Flows
- Pilots Scope
- Project portal/collaborative environment
- List of Commission A2A Services of Common Interest
- STORK Dissemination Plan
Looking at e-invoicing from the perspective of being a part of e-business and from an interoperability point of view, this information is quite useful.
What to amend?
So what to amend? A few things could be mentioned that could be used to change in order to improve (which is the definition of the verb to amend):
- redefine the mandate of the CEN/ISSS or of the next E-invoicing Workshop Phase (III)
- enable the use of webcast during public meetings
- try to aggregate a larger –online- audience and ask them for input on concept documents at all time
- don’t attempt to monopolize the process as this is no longer viable in this age of Internet, transparency and open innovation.
And also
- put less –or no- emphasis that this workshop is arguably non-commercial, because 85% of the attendees have a commercial interest and an even larger percentage of active contributors have an commercial interest.
- Try to be less picky on initiatives that have larger communities, more deliverables and impact. Yes, this one is completely biased, subjective and filled with some emotions! Anyone who wishes to confront me with this one, please do.
Instead, co-operation might be helpful. For everyone. Think about it. The EU and EC are even propagating it. Just look for: ‘enterprise+2.0’ in Google.
- Use more web 2.0: videos on youtube, etcetera.
- The ability of videoconfering: Looking back I would have been more than happy to have stayed at home and watch this session on videoconferencing.
That is it. Looking back at this article I associate it with a hedgehog. A sweet animal that catches everyone’s imagination, including spines that can be somewhat annoying. Oh, and funny of course, thinking of the game Sonic.
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