Standards Best Practices Blog

In my panel presentation at last week’s ANSI forum I talked about the dual aspect of a standards organization: it has the mission of developing standards, but also must be run as a ongoing, financially viable business. These two aspects give each other purpose: Without proper financing the organization will not be able to accomplish its mission, but without the mission it has no reason to require financing.

Each of these two aspects, the standards mission and the financial, will require their own strategies. For standards, the organization must decide what industry and market needs to address, what technologies to pursue, and what standards to create and promote. For finances, the organization must decide what business model to use in order to finance the organization, how revenues will be spent, how the organization will be staffed and organized, etc.

Usually the strategies for pursuing these two aspects would be considered to be quite separate things, but in reality they have a considerable amount of overlap.

Members will join the organization based on the work being done and whether it interests and benefits them, so the standards strategy will have a significant influence on member recruitment and retention. If the organization chooses to pursue technologies that no one is interested in then it will have no members or participants.

On the other hand, proper staffing, infrastructure, and educational and promotional activities will provide support for the standards development process and for the adoption of the completed work, leading to success in the organization’s mission.

This reliance of the two aspects on each other should be reflected in the organization’s structure. A Board of Directors of a corporation is usually composed of people having experience in business management; they are, after all, running a business. But the Board is usually also ultimately responsible for setting the technical strategy of the organization. Perhaps the organization has split the two functions and formed a technical advisory committee to advise the Board on such matters, or perhaps the Board has members with a combination of business and technical skills. In any event, however it is organized, the organization needs to make sure that both aspects, mission and business, are well taken care of  — and especially that they are coordinated and support each other.

Another of the topics from last week’s ANSI forum was the globalization of standards work, specifically, how U.S.-based organizations are pursuing work on a global basis. Presenters from WS-I, W3C, OASIS, and IEEE discussed the ways that their organizations are pursuing work on a global basis.

What does it mean to be a global standards organization? A popular claim is that some significant percentage of the organization’s membership is from outside of the US, as is the case with all of the above organizations. But how can that be measured, and what significance does that really have, in this age of multi-national corporations? Does an employee participant of IBM or Microsoft count if he resides in Europe, for example? Or how about a US-resident employee of Siemens, Philips, or Nokia?

Perhaps a better claim is that the organization develops standards with global applicability and meeting global needs, and supports and promotes the involvement of companies and individuals in all countries. This is perhaps not so easily quantified as counting the number of members who send their dues from outside the US, but may be more meaningful.

But can’t the organization “develop standards with global applicability and meeting global needs” using entirely US-based members and participants? Perhaps. I’ll suggest, however, that to be truly global the organization needs to take active steps to involve and support the participation of experts from the outside the US –not just those who understand the needs of their specific geographies, but also those who can participate at the same international level as their US-based counterparts.

Support for global activities could take the form of

• opening and staffing offices in other countries and conducting local promotional and educational events;
• providing a technical process that doesn’t require face-to-face meeting or voting, but allows for international telephone conferencing and asynchronous work such as electronic discussions;
• providing telephone bridges  and a technical infrastructure that supports this asynchronous work (email, collaborative editing, document management systems, electronic balloting, etc); and
• creating translations of draft and completed work into multiple languages.

There will be a variety of issues for the organization to concern itself with as it pursues global activities; it goes far beyond simply time zones. There will be a wider scope for avoiding duplication of and interoperability with existing work, for example. There is the increased importance of working with the recognized international bodies (ISO, IEC, and ITU) and the national bodies who are their members, and the submission of completed work to these organizations for ratification and approval. And there will be laws in other countries with regards to trademarks and branding of the organization’s work.

But the upside of all this effort is increased adoption of the organization’s work in a broader, global market. And as the ultimate goal of all standards organizations should be the adoption of their work, this should be well worth the effort.

The theme of my panel at the ANSI forum last week was the business issues related to standards organizations. Certainly the primary mission of the organization is to set standards rather than to make a profit, but without a solid financial base the organization will not be able to provide the support and structure for its volunteers to do the work of developing and approving standards.

The standards organization supports the work of its (usually) volunteer workers by providing

• Staffing, including for secretariat and process administration; membership management and support; events, promotional, and educational activities; and IT.
• Technical and strategic direction, through a combination of staff management and volunteer boards and advisory committees.
• Infrastructure, including email, web pages, committee rosters, document management and access control, collaborative editing environments, comment tracking, electronic balloting, calendars, etc.
• Organization and execution of events such as conferences and workshops, plug fests and bakeoffs, interoperability demos, etc.
• Distribution and long-term archiving of standards documents.
• Liaison with other standards organizations.
• etc.

Without the organization being able to provide services such as the above to its members, the volunteer participants themselves will be forced to perform or provide these activities, which would be a distraction from their creating standards and a hindrance to their completing the work.

A number of business issues face the management of the standards organization. The foremost of these will probably be the business model: Where does the organization get its funding? Most organizations get at least some portion, if not the majority, of their funding from membership dues. Of course the organization must provide benefits to the member in exchange; usually this in the form of the right to participate in developing the standard. So the organization must be doing work that the potential member is interested in and will benefit from. This suggests, then, that there is considerable overlap between the business aspect of the organization and the strategic and technical direction of the organization’s work.

Other business models include getting revenue from the sale of completed work. Many organizations, especially older or accredited standards organizations get half or more of their revenue from the sale of standards. But this business model is becoming increasingly difficult as “competing” standards organizations such as consortia make their work freely available, and as an increasing number of internet users expect all information to be free. Some organizations get revenue from a variety of other sources, including the development and sale of educational materials, conducting workshops and conferences, providing certification testing, and through the licensing of trademarks. Given the risk associated with any one of the possible sources of revenue, organizations would be wise to diversify and to pursue revenue from a variety of sources.

Another business issue facing management is how to staff the organization. A startup organization with a small budget and uncertain revenue will certainly need minimal staff, perhaps a single person, usually the Executive Director, who will perform many tasks. The organization may be wise to consider hiring an association management company (AMC) to provide services such as accounting, IT hosting, and event organization. Once the organization grows, additional staff can be hired and more of these operations brought in house.

Provision of infrastructure to the volunteer participants is another important topic. It’s relatively easy to set up some email lists and a web server, and document management software such as SharePoint can be added as well. But a piecemeal system built on a variety of systems cobbled together doesn’t always provide a good solution. The problem is that the various pieces won’t be integrated: To add or delete a user or to change a user’s access rights requires making entries in each of the various modules. This may be fine for an organization with a few dozen participants, but what do you do when the number grows to a few hundred or few thousand? Plus, most organizations that have opted to build their own system end up having to dedicate a number of IT workers to development, maintenance, security, and support. To solve this problem I recommend an integrated solution such as that offered by the Kavi toolset.

Yesterday I attended and chaired a panel at the Open Forum for Standards Developers sponsored by ANSI. This was the third in a series of events aimed at increasing the communication between accredited and non-accredited standards organizations, the so-called SSOs and SDOs. I’ve been privileged to attend all three of these events.

The chair, Andy Updegrove, kicked off the meeting by doing a quick run-down of statistics related to the various organizations represented at the meeting, to show that accredited and non-accredited organizations aren’t all that different. He cited the common perception that the ANSI-accredited organizations are US-focused, but pointed out that ASTM and IEEE each have members in nearly 150 countries. Another common perception is that consortia usually don’t last very long, but OASIS and W3C have each been around for more than a dozen years and have produced a considerable amount of work. A show of hands revealed that almost all of the organizations in attendance had concerns with IPR issues, and sources of revenue were varied among both accredited and non-accredited organizations. In short, while there is no one single description of the various accredited and non-accredited organizations, they are all more alike than is commonly thought. I reached the same conclusions in a paper I’ve submitted to be presented at a conference in the fall.

Presentations on a panel on IPR issues, chaired by Earl Neid from Intel, the chair of the ANSI Patent Policy group, pointed out that while managing IPR can be a big headache for most companies and standards organizations, IP in general can stimulate the creation of innovative technologies and promote market opportunities. There is a need to balance the interests of all stakeholders, but there is no “one size fits all” solution for any given organization. Ex ante patent policies were discussed, with the conclusion that ex ante is not necessary or workable in all cases but can be extremely valuable in patent-heavy industries or in other situations rife with patent issues.

Members of a panel chaired by Ron Silletti of IBM, a member of the ANSI Board of Directors, discussed how their individual standards organizations are becoming increasingly global and how they are accomplishing this. Developing standards with a global scope meeting global needs, involving users from a wide variety of countries, opening and staffing offices in other countries and conducting local activities, providing a technical process that doesn’t require face-to-face meeting, and providing a technical infrastructure that supports this asynchronous work, will all contribute greatly to success in global standards activities.

Questions to this panel started a discussion about working with and submitting completed work to the three “Big I” international standards organizations (ISO, IEC, and ITU). Steve Bratt of the W3C had mentioned that they had not yet chosen to submit any of their work to one of the international organizations, and I asked why. He said they have considered doing so, but had so far seen no compelling reason to do so. Other organizations on the panel (WS-I, OASIS, and IEEE) had submitted their work, and despite the sometimes great amount of time and work required to do so felt that it was worth the effort, as this gave their work additional credibility and lead to increased levels of adoption.

On a panel I chaired on business issues, representatives of accredited and non-accredited organizations discussed the common issues related to operating their organizations as businesses. The mission and goal of a standards organization is to produce standards, but unless it is run as a financially successful business it will not be able to achieve that goal. As Andy Freed from Virtual pointed out, “non-profit is a tax status, not a business strategy.” While most of the standards work taking place at a standards organization is done by volunteers, the organization must still provide support in the form of secretariat services and process administration, staffing of events, provision of technical infrastructure such as email, web, doc management, and balloting, and providing long-term distribution and archiving of the completed work.

Business issues can include any number of topics including the business model (where do revenues come from, including dues, sponsorships, sales, events, etc.), staffing models (the use of staff vs. volunteers, using in-house resources vs. outsourcing to an association management company), and membership (what are the membership levels and benefits, the dues levels, and how do you recruit and retain members). And so forth.

The business models used by some of the panelists varied; ASTM and NFPA get considerable amount of their revenues from the sale of standards (80% and 40% respectively, if I remember correctly). The panelists understood the risk of relying too heavily on any one source of income, and were trying to diversify; USB Implementers Forum, for example, gets revenues from a wide variety of sources including membership, sales, certification, licensing, events, etc. All of the organizations were cognizant of the importance of doing work that their members value, as a means of both recruiting and retaining members.

In wrapping up and summarizing the meeting, Andy Updegrove repeated his opening statement that the various accredited and non-accredited organizations have much in common and much that they could offer to help each other be successful. The attendees expressed interest in organizing forums for discussion – why don’t we, for example, have a means for all of the membership managers of various standards organizations to share notes? or executive directors, or process administrators, or any of the other job descriptions in both accredited and non-accredited organizations. I think that this is a marvelous idea, one that would help all of us do our jobs better by learning from others what works and what doesn’t.

An interesting article in the latest QST magazine for radio amateurs discusses the history of the international SOS distress call. Part way through the article I started thinking “this sounds a bit familiar… I’ve heard this before.” Not with regards to the history of the distress call itself, but as the development of an international standard.

In the very early years of the 20th century marine radio communications used Morse code, but there were few conventions for standard signals and abbreviations. Many of the early ship radio operators joined the industry worked previously as railroad or post office landline telegraph operators, and they brought with them certain conventions of that industry, including the CQ general call (i.e. “calling anyone who is listening”). Some operators used the CQ call for emergencies, but there was nothing to distinguish its emergency use from more general non-emergency uses.

The various manufacturers of ship radios each issued their own recommendations for abbreviations, and the Marconi Company, the dominant vendor in the industry, instructed its operators to use CQD (i.e. CQ Distress) for emergencies. But as operators of radios from other  vendors used different abbreviations, to say nothing of ships of different nationalities each having their own as well, there could be numerous codes used to signal distress.

A meeting in 1906 in Berlin was set up to standardize the abbreviations used by marine radio operators. In addition to the Marconi CQD, the Italians proposed SSSDDD and the Germans SOE. The terminal “E” on the German call, though, was a single dit which could easily be lost under bad conditions, so the proposal was changed to our now familiar SOS (. . .  - - -  . . . ).

The SOS code was adopted in 1908, but it took a few more years before it was universally used. It took the Titanic disaster in 1912, with the stories of the heroic radio operators, to raise public awareness of the code.

So why did this all sound so familiar to me? Just like the movie you haven’t seen but for which you can guess the plot, I knew what was going to come next. There was the technical problem to be solved, a variety of non-conforming and sometimes contradictory current practices, a number of proposals for a standard solution including one from a dominant vendor, political wrangling as each party and country tried to get their own practices adopted, change required because of technical issues regarding the proposal, the simple and elegant solution, its approval as a standard, the lag before its universal adoption, and finally the inevitable “what did we ever do before we had this” feeling among the users.

Funny how just about every standard goes through these same steps. Would it be possible to skip them and jump directly from need to universal adoption of the solution? I don’t think so. Sure, a god (or other 800 pound gorilla) could come down from the sky with a standard engraved on tablets, but would everyone be happy with the decree? Would the standard have had user input? Would it meet everyone’s needs? The very process of getting everyone’s input and hashing out possible solutions, finally reaching a compromise, is what makes a standard a standard.

What kind of participant are you in standards work? Is this a critical part of your job responsibilities, or do you just keep an eye on it from a distance? Are you personally interested or have technical expertise in the area, or have you just been assigned to watch the work as part of your job? Or perhaps you’re the end user/consumer at the end of it who doesn’t know anything at all about standards and just wants a product that meets your needs.

If you’re working on standards as part of your job, where and how you’re involved will have a lot to do with your employer, and the importance to the company of standards activities in general or of the specific organization or committee that you and your co-workers participate in. Does the company wish to drive the strategic or technical direction of the work, from which it intends to get some market benefit? Or does it simply want early access to the specification, or perhaps networking or educational opportunities for its employees. Your employer will, of course, expect to see some ROI, some benefit to the company for your time and effort.

Based on the above, you could be participating at any one, or any combination, of the levels described here:

Sponsor. A company can be a primary sponsor of the standards organization and/or particular activities at the organization by contributing heavily – financially – to the activity by purchasing the highest level of membership in the organization as well as sponsoring discrete organizational activities. The company will assign a significant number of employees to participate and provide their expertise, and make contributions of existing technical work that can be used as the basis of specifications created by the technical committees.

Director. Participants can participate in the governance of the organization by sitting on the Board of Directors or other governing, advisory, or strategy setting bodies. These participants have the opportunity to guide the strategic and technical direction of the organization and the technical projects that it will pursue.

Leader. Chairs and other leaders of  committees and working groups help set the direction of a particular committee at the organization. They help to keep the committee on track, coordinating the work of the various subcommittees and participants, making sure that everyone is working in unison to accomplish the committee’s goals.

Primary Contributor. A minority of committee members, perhaps 10%, are most actively contributing and working towards accomplishing the committee’s work plan and doing the primary work on the specification. Members could act as the specification editor, or as one of the technical experts who are creating and developing parts of the specification.

Active Contributor. While not participating and contributing as heavily as some of the others in the committee, and not being one of the top technical experts on the topic, a contributor can still actively review, test, and comment on the work done by others. The contributor could also work on some of the other aspects of the committee’s work, such as developing technical conformance or certification tests for the specification, or developing implementation guidelines or sample implementations.

Occasional Contributor. Participants could actively attend all of the committee meetings, and keep up with the state of the specification, without having much to contribute technically to the discussion. This participant can still add some value by providing a different perspective or set of needs than other members.

Observer. This participant will attend an occasional meeting, and usually read the committee’s emails, but does not participate or contribute and is mostly interested in simply monitoring what’s going on in the committee, either for personal interest and education or to watch for anything that may be of interest to his or her company. For committees that have a quorum requirement for voting it is best to exclude this type of participant from the count.

External Observer. This person is not usually a member of the organization but watches from outside. This could be a journalist interested in seeing how a new, possibly market affecting, technology is developed and how the politics are playing out. Or it could be an academic researcher interested in watching the technical process as a sociological or organizational behavior experiment.

User/Implementer. This is the company who builds a product implementing the specification/standard. The implementer is usually always, but not necessarily, involved in the standards work at one of the levels above.

End User/Consumer. And finally, we have the end user or consumer of the product that implements the specification, the entity for whom all of this is supposed to benefit, and whose money ultimately goes back up the food chain to pay for it all.

I’ve been away from the office for the past three weeks or so, first for ten days in Europe and then for another ten on vacation. My trip to Europe included a few days in Thessaloniki, Greece speaking at the meeting of the European Academy of Standardization, where I presented my paper on “Reducing the Costs of Standards Activities.”

This being an academic conference, with presentations from mostly researchers at various universities throughout Europe, I was a bit troubled by the presenters’ reliance on “the literature” and various surveys rather than on real-world experience with standards activities to make their points. Does the effort they put into their research ever produce real-world benefits or are they just intellectual exercises? In some cases the researchers have been commissioned by a standards organization or by the EC to study a certain topic; one would assume that these are related to specific problems for which answers and solutions are desired.

In any event, some interesting papers were presented. Here’s a couple of examples.

A research project by the Fraunhofer Institute, Berlin University of Technology, and University of Calgary surveyed participants in standards activities and found that the perception of the impact of consortia standards were quite similar to that of formal standards, but the impact of proprietary standards was viewed much more negatively. (That’s not much of a surprise regarding proprietary standards, but I was happy to see the positive reaction towards consortium standards.) There was some question regarding the methodology used by the researchers as they had surveyed only participants in formal standards bodies; I’m wondering how much more positive the results would be towards consortia standards if consortia participants had been included in the survey.

A paper from a researcher at Delft University discussed the issue of user representation in standards activities, something that I’ve written about before. Two levels of users were identified, the implementers of the standard into products, and the final end-user consumer. It would be more common for the former to be involved in the standards activities and much less for the latter, but what is the desirability of either? While democracy is desired, and usually mandated, end-users seldom have the desire or resources to participate, so indirect participation via representation is usually the answer.

Even though a lot of the work was a bit theoretical the presentations were still interesting. I’ll dig some “best practices” lessons out of these topics as I write further blog entries.

On June 20 in Boston a one-day meeting will be held to discuss issues related to standards setting.

Standards organizations operating on both the national and international levels, both accredited and non, all face similar issues regarding legal, business, and operational. The focus of this meeting will be to discuss some of these common issues and how standards organizations have solved them and how they can work together to further standards work.

I’ll be heading a panel discussing the business aspects of standards setting. In addition to an organization’s stated mission of developing standards for a given industry, it must also be a business. While the majority of the work is done by volunteers, the organization must still provide staffing support for the administration of the process, and an infrastructure (email, web, doc management, balloting, etc.) that will allow an efficient use of the volunteers’ time. The organization also manages activities related to the adoption of the standard, including promotional and educational activities, and conformance and certification. The organization must then also provide for the long-term archiving and maintenance of the work.

For the organization to be able to provide these services it must itself be an ongoing activity with sufficient financial resources to conduct these activities. It must have dependable sources of revenue, and expert, professional staff. It must be able to deal with IPR and other legal issues that may arise. How the organization — as a business — accomplishes these challenges is the theme of my panel.

I hope that you can join us. The meeting description and agenda, and registration information, may be found here.