Common interfaces for enterprise integration-experience with NRECA's MultiSpeak/sup TM/ specification

Enterprise integration has been an elusive goal for utilities for many years. Often the integration that has been achieved has relied on custom development of interfaces at each utility. This approach has been time consuming and expensive even when successful. Unfortunately, small utilities, such as most electric distribution cooperatives, do not have the information systems staff resources to attack integration in this manner; rather they often rely on vendors to provide suites of interoperable software. As a result, either their choices of software are limited or they must pay vendors to create and maintain custom software interfaces. In recent years, vendors serving this market have devoted a significant part of their development resources to writing the required interfaces, often to the exclusion of enhancing their core products. Thus co-ops and vendors have a shared need and significant incentive to address the lack of a standard means of software integration. The MultiSpeak Initiative is a collaborative effort of about forty vendors sponsored by the Cooperative Research Network of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. The Initiative has developed a specification for common data interfaces among backoffice applications widely applied at distribution cooperatives. This paper discusses the development of that specification. The purposes for the effort, the multi-vendor, collaborative approach taken during its development, the successes achieved as a result of its completion, and the promise for the future are presented.