With all the activity surrounding telematics and farm management systems, it’s sometimes difficult to identify all the right players. Are groups overlapping on effort? Are they working together efficiently?

To address these questions, ASABE hosted an Organizational Alignment in Standards Development meeting following their Agricultural Equipment Technology Conference (AETC) in Louisville, Kentucky last month. The interested parties identified the following goals for the session:

  1. Provide awareness of the roles of respective organizations
  2. Engage the right experts to minimize any duplication of effort
  3. Identify key alignments for present and future work

The organizations in the chart contributed to this meeting and provided input in their respective roles. An overview of the roles of each contributor was presented in an open discussion to inform attendees and answer questions.

Org chart

One of the highlights from the session was an excellent overview of the national and International organization structure and how the work activities of the different groups makes the way to the standards committees. Discussion on standards development often begins in AEM technical committees, for example, and AEM helps facilitate working relationships between organizations like AEF and AgGateway. This lays the groundwork in creating guidelines and business processes in order to take that work and develop it into national standards and ultimately international standards through organizations like ASABE and ISO.   

The diagram shown was also presented. It helps to illustrate some of the areas of activities between AEF and AgGateway and how smoothly they work together on farm management systems. At the top of the diagram it illustrates the combinations of machine to machine communications where AEF focuses much of its efforts. But as we progress further down to the center area, we can see how the activity starts to transition between AEF and AgGateway project teams. Only with well-coordinated working relationships can progress be made without overlapping and creating a waste of efforts. The lower section represents the management systems farmers use to effectively run their farm business activities, the primary focus of AgGateway.

AEM and AgGateway