Why is EDI still used, and how to deal with it?

One word, Inertia. Developing the EDI formats by committee between various companys and organisations with different agendas was a nightmare (sad to say I have been there).

Asking them to abandon these with yet another round of committees agreeing web service API standards is going to take even longer, how do you sell the idea of replacing one electronic format with another to a non-technical board? What possible busness advantage does it give them. Originally the benefits of electronic exchange were clear but replace one with another is not. We're talking really big companies here.

You may be interested in the following project:

http://bots.sourceforge.net/en/index.shtml Google code archive

EDI is not that hard to understand once you familiarize yourself with the delimiters it uses. You might ask yourself as well why anyone would still be using CSV or tab-delimited data.

The answer is probably that those formats are "domain specific languages" defined by committee and standardized in a certain industry, and that a lot of money has already been invested in supporting those formats. Where's the business case to throw that all out again?