International Standards: Why Do Them?

A friend recently asked me to help him write a justification for turning a proposed American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard into an international one, and I think it’s worth elaborating on here. I’ll skip over the bit about why you should standardize a specification in the first place—a very large subject that has been, and will continue to be, discussed in many publications. Instead, I’d like to begin by explaining what an international standard is. The best way to do this is to explain what constitutes a noninternational standard. As in previous columns, I will limit my discussion to information technology standards. In the US, most IT standards—those from the IEEE, Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), Electronics Industries Association (EIA), T10-SCSI, T11FibreChannel, and so on—carry the ANSI identifier. These are all national US standards. Informal standards groups and consortia can also develop standards, but these standards do not carry the ANSI title.