PIL03 – Annual Release Cycle (ARC)

Background

X12 publishes standards that define transaction sets for broad use, often across industries, and implementation guides that define the use of one or more of X12’s transaction sets for a specific business purpose. Historically, X12’s EDI Standard has been published annually and implementation guides have been published infrequently, with no set schedule.

The Annual Release Cycle (ARC) initiative is based on internal and external feedback indicating the lack of an established and reliable schedule and the extremely long maintenance cycle for updated versions of some technical reports were putting the future of the X12 organization at risk. After considering many options to address the issue, X12 leaders decided to integrate technical report maintenance with the established, efficient, and mature maintenance request process that has been used to maintain the EDI Standard for many years.

Pilot Precepts

Integrating the maintenance processes offers several advantages:

• One maintenance process simplifies processes
• A predictable and reliable schedule for publishing updates to X12 work products is advantageous to implementers, federal regulators, and other industry associations.
• A reduction of the burden on X12 member representatives

Each annual release will include all revisions to the EDI Standard and technical reports that were approved in the preceding calendar year. In other words, each annual release will include revisions documented on zero to many maintenance requests (MRs). This eliminates scope-creep and churning that can occur when publication schedules are variable and maintenance requests are grouped.

Pilot Term

The pilot shall be in effect for at least three annual releases and not more than 5 annual releases. Pilot versions of corporate and committee-level governance documents shall revert to normal maintenance processes at the end of the pilot period.

Pilot Policies

X12 establishes the following policies as governance for the pilot.

• The pilot is established as a committee-level pilot.
• Pilot versions of CAP11 and ASC02 define the authoritative policies and processes in effect during the pilot. During the pilot this governance shall be revised at the discretion of the ASC and PRB chairs as necessary to address issues, barriers, or improvements.
• As permitted in ASC02, it is expected that X12N will define subcommittee-level policies and processes for MR processing. Other subcommittees may also choose to define such policies and processes. Subcommittee policies and processes shall not overrule, subvert, or contradict the governance detailed in CAP11 or ASC02.

Document History