By Boomi
On Monday, January 12, 2022, Boomi Product Manager Byron Hall was elected to serve on the Accredited Standards Committee (ASC) X12 Board of Directors for the 2022-2024 term. Established more than 40 years ago, X12 is a non-profit, ANSI-accredited, cross-industry standards development organization whose work is used by an overwhelming percentage of business-to-business transactions upholding America’s electronic information exchange. We sat down with Byron to talk about his career prior to Boomi, his work with Boomi B2B/EDI Management, and the significance of X12 standards in the processes of B2B trading partners.
Before you joined Boomi, you gained a lot of experience in the technology space with other companies. Please share some of those experiences with us and how they eventually led to Boomi.
Byron Hall: Not long after college. I worked for a financial services institution, Principal Financial Group. I spent 10 years there managing some of the B2B-EDI infrastructure from the corporate side. This included, for example, Principal’s group health claims business. That was shortly after the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) passed. All of that was based on X12 standards.
You also spent some time on the consulting side, didn’t you?
Byron Hall: Yes. I went to work on a project for Wells Fargo in the fall of 2008. Not great timing. We all know what happened in the fall of ’08. The whole financial services world collapsed.
But from there, as a consultant, I went to work for MidAmerican Energy, a deregulated energy provider. Deregulation adds some additional complication to how the energy business works. You have a separation between the generation and transport business, and retail sales to the customers. Communication between those organizations is implemented with X12 standards.
It sounds like as your career progressed, you got deeper and deeper into the B2B standards business.
Byron Hall: Yes. After my consulting gigs, I worked for IBM selling EDI solutions in the health care space. I was doing solution design and writing some software. I worked for Axway, an enterprise software company, in a solution engineering and management role. So, for close to the last 20 years I’ve been heavily tied to and spent time around B2B and EDI standards and the various industries that leverage those standards.
What attracted you to Boomi? What was the opportunity for you?
Byron Hall: I was impressed by the way the Boomi platform operates with its cloud management layer, its ability to manage and distribute our runtime endpoints with the Atom, and its API-first architecture. The platform presents some very unique opportunities around how to create B2B and EDI services, which allow us to make it easier for our customers to consume and use those services.
Boomi’s ease of use is not just a business enabler, it’s a sales enabler. So, with all that and the company’s rate of growth, it was a great opportunity in the making.
What’s a day in the life of Byron Hall like? Are you huddled all day with an engineering team? Or are you spending time with customers?
Byron Hall: Both, really. My primary job is managing and curating our roadmap. Where do we want to take this product? What capabilities do we want to bring to the market long term? Those types of things. So, for that, I spend a lot of time with my engineering team.
But as a product manager, situations arise where I work with our presales and sales teams to engage with customers, who may have questions about our roadmap or long-term vision. Also, situations may arise from customer support or customer success where I get involved.
And I do a little bit of prototyping, not as much as I used to, but some work on that front as well.
In general, what’s the importance of EDI?
Byron Hall: EDI started as a common dictionary or language around data that helped the trucking industry and the military move goods from one place to another. This was way back, pre-internet. When you look at X12 and you look at a transaction, you’ll see different numbers mentioned. For example, an X12 850 is a purchase order. It’s the definition of a purchase order. An 810 is an invoice.
So, the common definitions allow you to communicate and connect those transactions to create a business process. And EDI is not just a data format. It’s a set of agreements between trading partners that tell each other how they’re going to do business. It’s a “handshake” across a business process.
And the more complex the supply chain, the more important it is to make these processes as efficient and error free as possible. Anytime you have multiple companies in a supply chain, it’s a great use for standards like X12.
You were recently elected to the board of X12. What is the value of taking on that position?
Byron Hall: I’ve been working with people at X12 for years. Stephanie Fetzer is the chair of X12 and I’ve known Stephanie for close to 15 years. And I’ve worked with others at X12 over that time. When I came into this product management role, I decided we were going to engage more actively with some of the standards’ bodies. Because that helps us shape what’s happening in the industry as well as ensure our product is in alignment with where the industry is headed.
So, instead of being reactive when the standards are released, we’re engaged and we’re able to understand when and where these shifts are coming, and we can have our product prepared and ready for the change in the market much quicker.
How did the opportunity to run for a place on X12’s board present itself?
Byron Hall: X12 announced the elections some months ago, and I was approached by one of the board members about running. There’s an initial application where your background is vetted. That focuses on your knowledge of and experience with implementing X12. And they’re looking for people who’ve had some thought leadership roles around the use of the standards. Our legal department was also involved to make sure there were protections around our intellectual property and that my responsibilities in the role were clear.
Boomi: What are your responsibilities as a board member?
Byron Hall: The board’s primary role is making sure the organization is sound from a business standpoint. We look at how the business is running, the way we’re consuming services and spending money, and how we’re offering services to X12 members.
But I can also participate in various committees and work groups that create and work on the standards. One I’m likely to focus on is X12C, communications and controls. X12C does a lot of the standards review. It spends quite a bit of time making sure the standards stay compatible.
Anything else you can share about the work going at X12?
Byron Hall: There’s work on internationalizing the standard. The way X12 came about, the standard was focused at the U.S. So, there’s been some limitations around the languages supported. When you look at different code sets of data, that potentially creates problems for X12. The board is addressing those issues.
There’s an effort to make the standard more flexible for activities in healthcare. For example, there are 170,000 International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM) diagnostic codes used in healthcare. So, there’s an effort to detach the code set from the standard, so there’s some flexibility with the code sets you can use with various versions of the standard.
X12 is also formulating recommendations for the next version of the HIPAA standards for healthcare processing. So, there are some pretty significant things underway.
How does the work X12 does dovetail with Boomi’s EDI/B2B management capabilities and influence the evolution of the product roadmap?
Byron Hall: It boils down to the work taking place in the workgroups because X12’s on a managed release cycle now — once a year. So, you can track the work and how it’s going to impact the annual release. For Boomi, it’s about leading from the front when those changes come. Not waiting til the changes come and then trying to figure what to do.
Typically, there’s not fast adoption of new versions. There are a lot of versions you must be able to support. It takes time for adoption and sometimes it takes government regulation. HIPAA, for example. And there needs to be agreement between partners on what version is used.
To wrap up, give me your three top reasons why X12 is important.
Byron Hall: Ok. First, X12 has been what’s allowed ecommerce to really take off. Because B2B relationships can agree on a set of communication and data standards. Second, X12 provides a means to interact, collaborate, and cooperate with other software vendors. So, Boomi can talk to IBM, Axway, Informatica… anyone. As long as we’re operating from the same implementation guide. X12 allows interoperability between software vendors. And third, it reduces cost and time to value for businesses, for our customers. The standards offer transparency across the supply chain, which means issues can be resolved quickly.
Please join us in congratulating Byron on his election to the X12 board!
For more information on how Boomi helps with EDI, visit our B2B/EDI Management webpage.