JISC

Although early efforts at standardisation were designed to increase efficiency and productivity on engineering projects, the potential to protect consumers also became an important factor. In the late 1950s, the British Standards Institution (BSI) extended the scope of their kitemark® standard to domestic goods, in order to enable consumers to ascertain the quality of products that were appearing on the market.

The lay person's understanding is that a standard can only be produced by a nationally or internationally recognised formal standards body (FSB) such as the BSI (UK), DIN (Germany), and organisations such as ISO and IEEE for international standards. This is true in a very specific way, but in a more general sense standards, particularly in the computer industry, are actually more complicated than this. As well as the formal standards bodies, there are other organisations which produce their own 'standards' and the status that these other standards accrue often depends, in part, on the status of the organisation that produced them.

There are now over 400 fora that are relevant to the development and adoption of ICT standards, all with their own blend of people representing different interests. A wide variety of international, European, national, and non-government agencies, as well as vendor organisations, academics and researchers, consortia, individual companies, and even individual people all get involved in the development of what might loosely be termed standards.