Information Management – Implementing ISO 15926

Why do we need ISO 15926? The short answer is: So that we can exchange and reuse complex plant and project information more easily and more cheaply. A slightly longer answer is: To mitigate the current high costs of rekeying and reformatting information to move it from one proprietary system to another. For example, take the task of designing, specifying, and purchasing a process instrument for a plant modification. Imagine how many times information has to be rekeyed after the instrument is designed, until it is installed and commissioned in the target plant (E8-2). This study was developed at the request of Fiatech members and in cooperation with the POSC Caesar Association, for the benefit of the capital projects industry.

Traditional ways of exchanging and reusing information all involve some variant of having someone read one document and then decide which parts to transcribe to a different document. This is true whether we are moving a single value from one data sheet to another or mapping entire databases together. Even with modern computer technology, we still rely on highly skilled people to interpret information and to discern which data values are important. For example, when we look at a data sheet we rely on visual cues and our experience to deal with attribute names that are usually inadequate in themselves to make fine distinctions between similar terms. To understand what our data means, we need more information than is contained in the data itself (E8-2).

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) reported claims that 40 percent of engineering time was spent finding and verifying information. Overall, the study showed that the lack of interoperability among computer-aided design (CAD), engineering, and other software systems costs the American capital projects industry more than $15 billion every year.

Current information exchanges, typically in the handover phase of a project, involve a large amount of human intervention making many data exchanges uneconomic. Using ISO 15926, the mechanics of information exchange will fade into the background thus allowing more data exchanges to take place economically. ISO 15926 is all about driving out ambiguity to reduce the risk and cost of information exchange. The most important things an organization can do to implement ISO 15926 are to thoroughly understand the data in terms of reference data, and to understand that representing the data so the context or meaning is part of the payload is fundamentally different.

ISO 15926 focuses on modeling the information to preserve its meaning as it is being exchanged. In summary, it makes exchanging information between applications easier in two ways:

1. When information exchanges go beyond manually rekeying data or using point-to-point custom mapping, there is a need to create a data dictionary containing definitions of all objects in the facility along with their attributes.
2. When information is exchanged, people are needed to manage the transactions. Using the full specification of ISO 15926 will make information exchanges easier by essentially building the context of the information into the information itself to capture the precise meaning of each term and embed it with the term.