Standards are established over years of testing and transformations. It requires efforts and trust in the establishing authority. Moreover, standards must be implemented effectively and most importantly widely adopted. If a standard is not widely adopted, it is not recognized as a best practice.

So, how do standards come about? There are mainly 4 ways standards are established.

Multinational Authorities – these include international legal agreements or treaties. Usually, it will take a longer process before such standards are established. It may or may not involve technical experts in establishing the standards as parties involved might be diplomats. An example will be International Organization for Standards (ISO), a worldwide federation of national standards bodies, which developed more than 22,000 standards.

Consortiums – an association that made up of different groups that develops standards for specific industry. The members can be competitors in the same industry. However, they use their resources to establish standards for wider community. Such consortiums includes, WWW Consortium, The Open Group, OASIS Open, and Apache Group.

De Facto Standards – standards that widely implemented and accepted over time through best practices. It is not created by single body or an association.

Open Source Groups – these groups are formed based on communities around open source initiatives and cryptocurrency projects. The processes and standards are defined by wider key members through forums, message boards, Discord, Twitch, Telegram, and more. The benefits of these groups are lesser processes and faster turnaround time for change. However, to come to conclusions for decisions might take longer as there might not be top-down direction. Also, trust can be an issue in such groups if members are not doxxed.

The standards are then established in these phases:

  1. No Standard Available
  2. Developing Phase
  3. Approval Phase
  4. Implemented Phase
  5. Market Accepted Phase
  6. Decommissioned Phase

A few main standards in IT includes:

  1. ISO 9001 – Quality Management Systems (QMS)
  2. ISO/IEC 27001 – Information Security Management (ISM)

A few main associations for standards in IT includes:

  1. Cloud Security Alliance
  2. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
  3. Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF)
  4. Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC)
  5. Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA)
  6. Open Commons Consortium (OCC)
  7. The Open Group

As IT is segregated by different verticals such as application, networking, and data, not all associations and standards published are applicable to your daily work. However, you may explore them during your free time.

You can also take up certifications and join their memberships to get more involved with the communities.

What other standards do you know or have used before? Share with us below!

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