You may have heard recently that the leadership of Open Secure Access (OSA) has transitioned from Allan Stejskal to Greg Collins. In its short existence OSA has made an impact in automotive retail. It has helped the industry focus on some critically important issues and pushed for an industry discussion of those issues. Looking ahead, OSA has both great opportunities and great challenges.
OSA began as a single-issue consortium of automotive retail vendors. Its mission was to maintain a dealer systems environment in which there was open, competitive access to DMS data for the purposes of data integration and data analysis. It appeared to some at its public inception that OSA was nothing more than sour grapes from competitors opposed to Reynolds’ RCI program. I believe that OSA could have easily succumbed to this low calling. Fortunately though, OSA has taken a more principled and less partisan stance.
Certainly OSA focused heavily on demanding that Reynolds allow dealer-approved vendors free access to the data stored in its dealer systems. But it also sent a clear message to the data integrators that they needed to clean up their shops. OSA not only acknowledged Reynolds’ legitimate points about the reckless nature of dealer data access today, but took action to put in place an institution for validating that data integration vendors (aka hostile integrators) took responsibility for securely handling the data. After an open comment process OSA published security guidelines for the industry and will soon offer a certification program.
Though Oxlo is not a data integrator, we nonetheless are in a position where we manage and distribute dealer data. We consider the OSA security credential an absolute necessity for our business and so should the data integrators. It’s simply a matter of professionalism.
A great deal of the credit for driving this progress goes to Allan Stejskal. His skilled diplomacy allowed him to talk with everyone in the industry in a way that was uniformly respected. He created dialog between parties that otherwise wouldn’t have connected. Automotive retail is better for his efforts.
Where does OSA go from here? Now that it has created a standard and a credential for Security, will it also attempt to rate the Openness of vendors? While STAR has defined a number of data integration templates for integration between dealer systems and automaker systems, it has yet to address integration between the various systems and services that run a dealership. This is definitely an area where OSA could add more value for the industry, but it will have to sort out its relationship with STAR. In any case, we wish Greg well, and look forward to working with him to build a better dealer systems market.
Interesting article. Any idea on where I can get more information on this?
Posted by: Car Loans | June 16, 2008 at 10:14 AM