---
title: How do you know a standard has been adopted?
description: Most organisations have no systematic way to check a standard is being followed. Lessons from our NHS England webinar on proving adoption, not assuming it.
image: https://metadataworks.ai/hubfs/wesley-tingey-snNHKZ-mGfE-unsplash.jpg
---

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 November 9, 2026

# How do you know a standard has been adopted?

![Picture of Adam](https://metadataworks.ai/hs-fs/hubfs/adam.jpeg?width=50&name=adam.jpeg) By  [Adam](https://metadataworks.ai/blog/author/adam)  ·   3 minute read

*This short article recaps on some key points made in last week’s live webinar ‘***From published to proven: how a national standard gets adopted with the NHS Standards Directory’.** *If you’d like to see the recording and slides, drop us a note [here.](mailto:hello@metadataworks.co.uk)*

---

## How do you know a standard has been adopted?

Last week, I spent an hour with Bharat Sharma from NHS England talking about what happens to a national data standard after it is published. Attendees dialled in from the worlds of local government, central government, the NHS, research and academia from the UK, Europe and further afield.

We opened with a short poll, mostly so we could pitch the hour at the right level. One question asked how people check that suppliers or partners actually meet the standards they have set. Two thirds of those who answered had no systematic way of doing it: 27% said they simply don't or can’t check, 20% rely on suppliers declaring it themselves, and 20% work through emails and spreadsheets by hand. Another 27% described some other approach. Just seven per cent had a dedicated platform for the job.

We also asked what their biggest challenges are. "Proving adoption and understanding usage" came top, chosen by 71%. Interoperability problems caused by a lack of standardisation followed at 64%, not knowing which standard or version to use at 50%, and people being unable to find the standards at all at 36%. Among those who answered, 86% publish standards of their own, externally or internally.

It is a small, self-selecting sample, a group of data professionals who had chosen to spend an hour of their Tuesday with us, and I would not build a policy on it. But it is consistent with what we see in our work, and it points somewhere specific. The hard part is not writing the standard, and it is not publishing it either. The hard part is knowing whether anybody is following it and encouraging the right individuals or organisations to do so.

### What that gap costs

That might sound like a technical housekeeping problem. I think it is closer to a commercial one.

In October, HM Revenue and Customs announced that it had selected Salesforce as its strategic enterprise customer relationship management provider, in an agreement running up to fifteen years and worth up to £2 billion. The aim — consolidating a sprawl of older systems into something a caseworker can actually use — is a reasonable thing to want, and I have no view on the supplier choice. I have not seen the contract, and there may well be provisions in it that the announcement doesn't mention.

What I keep returning to is the duration. Fifteen years is longer than the working life of most data standards. What makes a commitment like that survivable in year fifteen probably isn't the contract itself; it is whether the data accumulating inside the platform is described in a standard the buying organisation owns and could hand to somebody else. The public announcement says nothing about open standards, interoperability, data portability or exit — and perhaps that is simply not what press releases are for. But it is a fair question to ask of any long agreement, and on the evidence of our poll it is a question most organisations currently have no way of answering.

Because if you cannot prove conformance to a standard, the supplier gradually becomes the standard. Not through anyone's bad intent. It just happens, one undocumented field at a time.

### The other way round

The alternative is less dramatic and a good deal more useful, and we have been building it with NHS England for adult social care.

The Minimum Operational Data Standard — MODS — is the first national record standard for adult social care. It is published in the NHS Standards Directory, which is Bharat's team's work: a federated system that brings standards metadata together for discovery without requiring the standards themselves to move or their owners to give up control. As Bharat put it on the day, the problem he set out to solve was that standards live across many bodies and many websites, with no official single source of truth, and that the person who needs one has to be able to find the part that applies to them.

Suppliers then prove conformance through the Assurance Portal. Rather than declaring they meet the standard, they submit evidence, and somebody who knows the standard well reviews it at each step.

Twenty-three suppliers have now achieved conformance, and 70% of them did it in under sixty days. That second figure is the one I would ask you to sit with. Two months, for most of them, to move from "we believe we comply" to "someone who knows this standard has checked, and the record says so."

The point Bharat made that landed hardest for me is that the assurance work improves the standard. Every completed record shows where a requirement reads two ways, or where the same question keeps arriving. A standard that gets clearer because people are using it behaves very differently from one that is published and then left alone.

### What travels

I think the lesson travels well beyond health and care, and well beyond standards work.

Specify the standard that data must conform to, and build a way to prove that it has been met, and the supplier question becomes a lot less load-bearing. It will not solve vendor lock-in on its own — nothing does — but it changes what you are depending on. Twenty-three suppliers meeting one standard is a healthier position than one supplier being the standard, and on the evidence so far it can be reached in about two months rather than fifteen years.

Mandate the standard, not the supplier.

The recording from the session is available if you would like it - just drop me a [message](mailto:hello@metadataworks.co.uk). If you were in attendance yesterday and we promised a follow up, don’t worry, the team is working through that this week.

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