Today I attended an open meeting with the Swedish standardisation organisation Fi2 (in Swedish 'Föreningen för förvaltningsinformation') which aims to make it easier to exchange information within the lifecycle of a (commercial) property.

The organization was founded in the mid 90s and is showing more and more results. Especially among suppliers of Property Management Systems but also in the new field of energy reports that from 2009 must be reported to The National Board of Housing, Building and Planning from 2009.

Pisces in the UK
Another organization that shows result in the area of standardization is the UK based organization PISCES. At the PCS Expo in London in October an impressive presentation was conducted by Chris Lees from Calvis had a brilliant walk through of the project how one of UK's largest property owners has gotten four law firms to use Acrobat Reader documents to fill in and send the lease agreements (including over 200 data fields) using a PISCES standard XML schema. Read more about this at this Realcomm Advisory.

The need is there but it is hard work
There is no question that there will be benefits for standards in the real estate industry but it is hard work to set it in place. So I'm very impressed by those people and companies that is putting efforts behind it. Keep up the good work.