Policies

In short policy originates from within an organisation with the objective of delivering positive benefit or avoiding negative effect from the organisation's perspective. The degree of compliance with policy is generally not negotiable and the individual at fault will generally experience some form of penalty being imposed by their organisation. In this case the ultimate penalty would be termination of employment.

Standards

On the other hand standards tend to originate from without and may be voluntarily adopted by the organisation or their compliance may be forced upon an organisation by external forces such as government legislation or industry-wide recommendations. Standards infer compliance or opt-in. The degrees of compliance tend to be rigid in areas of regulatory need as failure to comply will ultimately result in penalties being imposed upon an organisation. Depending upon the breach incarceration may result.

The Importance of Standards

Now let us examine the concept of standards in a little more depth. We will begin by looking at the question “why do we need standards?”

Often the importance of standards goes unnoticed until we are faced with the scenario of a total lack of any standards and the chaos that ensues. Standards and the standards organisations that define them form the basis upon which technologies are developed and eventually delivered to our door.

It is through the roles played by standards and the standardisation that can result from them that we begin to see consistency and improvements in aspects such as: quality, safety, reliability, efficiency, interchangeability, and the provisioning and delivery of these benefits in the most economical (cost effective) manner. It is no good having the world's greatest product if it does not have the in-built capabilities to interact and interoperate with other devices.

Put simply we need standards in order to provide consistency and compatibility across the board for each and every class and type of device and technology. Areas of great complexity that need multitudes of individual components to interoperate in a carefully orchestrated manner; as is the case with most things in our electronic technological world today, are built on foundations based on standards and standardisation.

For example:

The Internet as we know it today has evolved through a number of various stages beginning with a simple transmission of information between a very limited number of geographically diverse systems.

• At first only text was transferred between end-points using a set of standards and protocols known as the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) & the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Or as they are generally to as “the language of the web.”
• The protocol suite that was initially designed to address all of the issues involved in achieving this was defined as TCP/IP and the model that was built as a reference model to overcome the incompatibilities inherent in proprietary systems; the Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) was formulated and standardised
• Then over time and as technology built on these foundations the transmission of graphics and other images became feasible. Sound was also transferred via the web.
• The quality of the images and sound transmitted improved. Compression technologies matured and the transfer of digital media such as music in the form of MP3 or photos as JPEG files became ever more popular.
• Building even more on our foundations (the OSI Reference Model and TCP/IP) all manner of digital media became transferable via the Internet. The advent of publically available, accessible and affordable email along with the popularity of e-commerce saw the massive explosion in growth of the Internet in the late 1980s and the .com (dot com) boom of the nineties.
• This explosion was fueled by the massive drop in prices of networking equipment; including PCs, home modems and network adaptors falling below $30 per unit. Added to this we saw the competition between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) become ever more intense and so we witnessed the birth of electronic communications between private individuals on a global scale.
• Eventually fully digital systems became the norm and such capabilities as streaming media, RSS feeds, and digital shopping and commerce became realities
• Today we are seeing this continue to evolve into such forms as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Voice over IP (VoIP) and Unified Communications (UC) at both the corporate and private levels. The capacity for us to “stay in touch” over vast distances still fuels the ever expanding realms of the Internet.

The point is that without standards and standardisation none of this would be possible; at least not now. Email is one of the more pervasive of the Internet technologies as we don't even need to be at any given physical location or at any specific particular device in order to receive or send it. The local library serves the same purpose as your home PC or the one at work and now even your mobile phone is getting in on the act.

Consider for a moment the scenario where vendor X's hardware, software and services were incompatible with those from vendor Y and you would have a world in which only those aligned with vendor X could intercommunicate and the same for vendor Y's customers. But neither would talk between the other.

What is a Standard?

A Standard is a published document which sets out the specifications and procedures that are designed to ensure that a material, product, method or service is fit for its purpose and consistently performs in the way it was intended.

A standard can be: open, proprietary, de facto, de jure, opt-in and even an opt-out standard all of which I will be discussing in the second part of this series. As the series unfolds I will be discussing such topics as:

• What is in a Standard?
• What are the Benefits of Standards?
• What is Standardisation?
• What are Standardisation Processes?
• What is Standards Compliance?
• Why Do We Have Standards Organisations And What Do They Do?
• I will provide a brief discussion of a select group of international standards organisations and the roles that they play in the scheme of things. I say select as most of the organisations that I will be discussing are in some way or another related to IT, networking, the Internet, computer systems, communications, security (especially IT related security SANS) as well as organisations that have a diverse influence across the board such as the Project Management Institute (PMI) and disaster related organisations as the tsunami disaster was very close to home (I reside in Australia as you probably have worked out by now).
• Standards, Conventions and Protocols
• The various forms and formats which different standards can adopt including white papers and Request For Comment (RFC)

So until next time enjoy!!