Viewpoints on improving the standards making process: document factory or consensus management?

Emerging standards and guidelines need to be timely and reflect the requirements of the industrial sector they are designed to support. However, often, the delay between the identification of a need for a standard and its eventual release is too long. There is a need for increased understanding of the sources of delay and deadlock within the standards process. In this paper we describe an application of PERE (Process Evaluation in Requirements Engineering) to the standards process. PERE provides an integrated process analysis that identifies improvement opportunities by considering process weaknesses and protections from both mechanistic and human factors viewpoints. The resulting analysis identified both classical resource allocation problems and also specific problems concerning the construction and management of consensus within a typical standards making body. A number of process improvement opportunities are identified that could be implemented to improve the standards process. We conclude that consensus problems are the real barrier to timely standards production. Ironically the present trend for more distributed working and electronic support (via e-mail etc.) may make the document factory aspect of standards production more efficient at the expense of consensus building.