JISC

In the past, the process of formal standards development was very time consuming, with full ISO accreditation taking up to seven years. The reason for this was, partly, because of the need to be seen to be as democratic as possible, since some of the standards that are ratified by the formal standards bodies go on to form the basis for legal regulation within individual countries. Regulators are therefore expected to have a principled concern for the fullest democratic accountability during the development of what may become legally mandated requirements. In addition, formal standards are traditionally used in procurement decisions by central government departments.

However, in the late 1980s this became a problem for the fast-moving computer industry. The story has it that the speed of innovation meant that technical developments were increasingly time-sensitive, and that this led to the creation of faster-moving, industry-led consortia to act on standards development. In fact, some commentators argue that little quantitative data for this speed deficit exists, but, whatever the underlying reasons, one of the factors has to be the fact that the technology area with greatest growth at the time (the early Internet and Web) did not seek any formal standards body activity, but chose to work through the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and W3C rather than the ISO.

The rise and growth in the number of consortia in the early 1990s came as quite a shock to the ISO and other national bodies involved in IT standardisation, who saw a reduction in both their activities and in the number of members of their bodies. This, in turn, led them to streamline some of the bureaucratic burdens. As an example, this reduced the time from start to becoming a draft standard in ISO/IEC from seven years in the late 1980s to three years by the mid 1990s.

Two of the most important innovations in respect of speed of process were the introduction of Fast-Track in 1987 and PAS (Publicly Available Specifications) in 1994. Fast-Track allowed consortia and membership fora who already had a formal relationship with JTC1's standards work to submit prepared technical specifications as Draft International Standards, thereby circumventing some of the earlier standards development processes.

However, although there is now a wide variety of consortia and formal standards bodies working in the technical arena, it would be simplistic/unfair to conceive of consortia as fast but undemocratic and formal standards bodies as slow but democratic and open. This is a complex discussion and has been the subject of debate amongst people involved in standards development for the last 25 years. The interested general reader should bear these debates in mind when reviewing the progress of a technology through one or more of these types of bodies.