Corporate shortcut to standardization

Screw threads are stable. If a standard for a screw thread is developed or reconsidered by standards developers every five years, then the market is satisfied that the standard is responsive to market needs. The International Organization of Standardization (ISO) has an entire Technical Committee devoted to screw threads, and it smoothly follows the five-year cycle for considering screw-thread standards. For information technology standards, however, the market will not wait five years for a standard. In the mid-1980s, ISO helped create a special committee to produce and maintain IT standards called the Joint Technical Committee for Information Technology (JTC1). However, JTC1 inherits the methods of ISO and may take five years to produce or change a standard. So there is a tension between the mission of JTC1 and the methods it follows. Increasingly, consortia that have no relation to JTC1 produce the important IT standards. For instance, JTC1 has slowly developed largely irrelevant Open Systems interconnection standards for computer networking. The Internet Engineering Task Force, which has no relation to JTC1, has rapidly developed monumentally important Internet standards. JTC1 is trying to reengineer itself. The most significant part of this reengineering has been the introduction of a new process to allow organizations that previously could not submit