thedataexistsbutcan’ttalktoitself

These 19 problems share the same invisible barrier: data exists in separate organizational systems with incompatible formats, and no single organization has the incentive to fix it. As the collection grew, five new members joined — government legacy IT spanning five decades of schema incompatibility, logistics supply chains with 40+ document formats, clinical trial data fragmented across sponsors and regulators, utility grid vendor lock-in, and multimodal freight tracking. Vendor lock-in and legacy-system incompatibility are major drivers. The transfer story is stronger than ever: health informatics' HL7 FHIR standard succeeded by allowing gradual, modular adoption. Every field represented here needs its own FHIR.

The data exists. The systems that hold it literally can't understand each other. And no one has the incentive to build the translator — because the cost is shared but the benefit goes to someone else.