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KARL MOORE – This is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, talking management for The Globe and Mail. Today, I am delighted to speak to JoAnne Yates from MIT [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management].
Why is the process of standardization so important in today's economy?
JOANNE YATES – The practice was designed back at the beginning of the 20th century in a way that tried to encourage fairness and focus on the technical, rather than the political, to get agreement on standards because the standards are voluntary.
Companies don't have to follow them once standards are set. So the way that you get them to follow them is to have everyone buying in. That means you have to have all the stakeholders in the room and you have to have a process that is focused on being as fair as possible.
One of the pieces of that that we have been thinking about lately is balance. A lot of the old traditional standards organizations required that you had balance between manufacturers of something, on the one hand, and users, firms that are users, on the other, as well as some neutral engineers as well in the room.
Now that consortia are coming up and being used more often to set standards, that's not so true. We don't have the balance any more. It worries me a little that we don't have that balance, that one side or the other. In a consortium, it is almost always either the manufacturers or the users, but it is often not both.
KARL MOORE – What should we do?
JOANNE YATES – I think we should actually ... There are times when it is important to get all the manufacturers together or get all the users together to think about what their needs are. But ultimately, before a standard is set, it should come in front of a body that has a balance requirement, where there are going to be stakeholders from all sides.
That means that, even though it takes time, organizations like the ISO, the International Organization for Standardization and those big old organizations that have been around for a long time, they have tried to speed up their processes, but it takes time to get to that consensus across stakeholders, and sometimes you have to have that time.