Types of Standards
We saw in my previous blog entry that standards in 1929 were generally used for reducing variety, for simplification, for reducing the numbers of items produced, eliminating the outliers, and thus reducing costs of manufacturing. This was just a step further in the industrialization of the U.S. and the mass-production movement that gave us interchangeable parts and standard clothing and shoe sizes.
That’s not to say that that was all that was being done; perhaps the writer of the Britannica article was simply caught up in the emphasis of that decade. There had certainly been a lot of standards efforts in interchangeable parts and manufacturing processes, and many of the “grandfather” organizations of today such as ASTM, IEEE, and ANSI had their roots in work started in the late 19th century.
But it’s now 2007. What does standardization look like today? It’s certainly more extensive; rather than the small handful of organizations developing standards back then, we have hundreds. And rather than focusing mostly on variety reducing standards we have standards in dozens of categories.
ISO defines a standard as a “document, established by consensus and approved by a recognized body, that provides, for common and repeated use, rules, guidelines or characteristics for activities or their results, aimed at the achievement of the optimum degree of order in a given context.” Or, as I generally paraphrase, an agreed-upon way of doing things to achieve a specific result.
The definition gives us a lot of wiggle room as far as the purpose of the standard, the means used to develop and approve it, its contents, the means defined by the standard to achieve the stated goal, etc. And this is appropriate: there is no “one size fits all” that will satisfy all conditions, requirements, technologies, etc. for all industries and audiences.
That leads to the creation of many different types of standards, or different ways to classify them. And by that I don’t mean just different types of technologies or different industries. Here’s just a few of the different classification schemes that I’ve seen while reading various descriptions of standards:
- De facto vs. de jure; whether the technology or product is simply accepted or widely used by the market, or it is a formal specification that has been approved by a recognized or accredited body.
- Mandated vs. voluntary; whether use of or compliance with the standard is required by law, or if its use is voluntary and optional.
- Anticipatory vs. retrospective, proactive vs. reactive; whether the standard reflects the development of a new, perhaps bleeding edge, technology, or if it is simply the codification of an existing technology or practice already in use by industry.
- Open vs. proprietary; whether the standard is freely available for all parties to use without the requirement of licensing or payment of royalties.
- National, regional, etc.; whether the standard is designed, approved, or mandated for use within specific geographical or political boundaries.
- Physical/measurement/unit/reference. These are the oldest standards, going back hundreds and even thousand of years; the biblical cubit, for example. The oldest standards organizations were created to define things such as railroad track gauge, screw threads, etc. This also includes the imperial and metric measurements for inch, foot, mile, pound, and meter, liter, etc., time measurements such as second, minute, hour, or the calendar, or the octane of gasoline, the Kw/hr for electricity, etc.
- Performance. These standards, sometimes government mandated, are for such things as vehicle miles per gallon or the efficacy of pharmaceuticals
- Safety standards, such as for the lamp cord that has an Underwriters Laboratory sticker on it, fire protection equipment, etc.
- Compatibility/interface/interchange, including screw threads and railroad track gauges (see above) but also all of the plugs and wire connections we use every day for our computers and other electrical appliances. But this isn’t restricted to physical objects; data models and syntax for information exchange at various levels in the stack all fit in this category.
- Variety reducing, such as clothing and shoe sizes, tire sizes, lumber, etc.
Note that this is not an exhaustive list; there are always going to be new ways to classify things. Note also that there is a great deal of overlap in these categories; for example screw threads fall into both measurement and compatibility, and tire sizes are both variety reducing and reference.
The short message, though, is that there’s a lot going on.