You Can't Do This Alone
Everything this series has examined so far sits inside the organisation. The governance decision that wasn't made. The functions that hold different versions of the same figure and don't know it.
Those are problems an organisation can decide to solve. They require leadership will, organisational clarity, and sustained investment — but they are within reach of a single organisation that chooses to address them.
The next problem is not.
The DPP requires data to flow across organisations, not just within them. A verified material composition claim does not originate with the brand. It originates with the supplier, or the mill, or the certifier who audited the farm. The brand assembles the passport. The evidence behind it was created elsewhere — by entities the brand does not own and cannot fully control.
For that evidence to be usable — verifiable, consistent, retrievable on demand across regulatory jurisdictions — the organisations involved need to be able to exchange data in a form that each can read, trust, and act on. Not through bilateral agreements negotiated one relationship at a time. Not through PDFs emailed between portals. Through shared standards that make the data coherent regardless of which system produced it or which system receives it.
That is interoperability. And it is the precondition for everything the DPP is designed to achieve.
Most organisations have not yet encountered interoperability as a strategic problem, because they have not yet needed to. Their data challenges have been internal — fragmented systems, ungoverned data, functions operating from different versions of the same information. Those are hard enough. But they are problems a determined organisation can solve within its own boundaries.
Interoperability does not live within boundaries. It lives between them. A brand can govern its own data with great rigour and still find, at the moment a passport needs to be verified by a customs system in a different regulatory jurisdiction, that the data format it used is not the format that system expects. A supplier can invest in traceability infrastructure and still find that the certification it issues cannot be read by the brand's product information platform without manual intervention. The quality of the data on either side is not the issue. The absence of a shared language is.
This is why interoperability cannot be delegated to IT as a technical integration project. The question of which standards to adopt, which data structures to use, which certification formats to accept — These are decisions with commercial, legal, and strategic implications that go beyond any implementation team's mandate. They are decisions about which ecosystem an organisation is building toward, and on what terms.
The ecosystem dimension is where the argument shifts. A single organisation implementing the right internal data infrastructure is necessary. It is not sufficient. The value of a verified product data record is determined not only by the quality of the data it contains, but by how many actors in the value chain can read, trust, and act on it. A passport that cannot be verified by the retailer's qualification system, or the customs platform at the border, or the recycler's intake system at end of life, is a passport that has not yet fulfilled its purpose.
This is the network logic of interoperability. Each organisation that adopts shared standards increases the value of the network for every other participant. Each organisation that builds to proprietary specifications — or defers the standards question entirely — fragments the network and imposes integration costs on everyone it needs to exchange data with.
The fashion and textiles industry is at the point in this trajectory where the standards are being set. Not in a central authority, not by a single regulator, but through the convergence of organisations building toward compatible infrastructure. The UN Transparency Protocol — UNTP — is the emerging interoperability framework for the product data economy: open standards, no central database, each organisation hosting its own data while exchanging it in formats any participant can verify. The textile sector is among the first industries formalising its extension of that framework. The organisations engaged in that process are not simply preparing for compliance. They are shaping the vocabulary their competitors will later be required to speak.
The strategic implication is one most leadership teams have not yet priced. In a market where verified product data is becoming a condition of access — to retailers, to investors, to circular economy models that depend on knowing a product's history — the ability to exchange that data coherently across the value chain is not a technical capability. It is a market position.
Organisations that build toward interoperability now will find the verification requests, the qualification processes, and the regulatory declarations that follow the DPP's enforcement increasingly straightforward. Those that defer will find each new requirement arriving as a bilateral negotiation — a new integration, a new format, a new manual process bridging a gap that shared standards would have closed.
Data capability does not stop at the organisation's boundary. It extends into the ecosystem the organisation operates within — the suppliers, the certifiers, the platforms, the regulators. Building it well means building it to connect.
No organisation does this alone. The ones that understand that earliest will not be waiting for the standards to arrive. They will have helped write them.
Michael Shea is a digital excellence advisor, non-executive director, and leadership coach working with organisations navigating the human and technical dimensions of digital transformation. He hosts The Aeolian Discourse and writes at The Aeolian.