BY JOSEPH A. NAUJOKAS, NAUJOKAS & ASSOCIATES,
ICMA STANDARDS REPRESENTATIVE
Here's a challenge — try to answer this question in one column.
Well we have a lot to cover, so lets go!
The organization
ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, has 187 Technical
Committees who are responsible for developing standards within their
scope of work. ISO & IEC1 teamed together in 1984 to form a Joint Technical
Committee 1 (JTC1) for standardization of Information Technology. JTC1 has 16 Sub Committees (SC)2 such as SC 7 "Software
Engineering" and ours, SC17 "Cards and Personal Identification."3
The two most common membership classes in SCs are National Body (NB)
and International Liaison (IL). JTC1 SC17 has 32 voting NBs, and examples
of its more active NB members are ANSI (USA), DIN (Germany), BSI (UK),
AFNOR (France), JISC (Japan), SCC (Canada) and AENOR (Spain). Recently,
China has attended some meetings as well. International Liaisons are
usually multinational organizations who have a major role in the work
of the SC and have been approved by the SC. ILs participate in the committee
work, but have no voting rights in the SC. Some examples of ILs in SC17
are MasterCard, Visa, American Express and of course ICMA. Participation
of ILs is generally highly valued because they bring both marketing
and technical expertise to the process.
The Sub Committees allocate their work into Working Groups (WG) where
the standards are written. International Working Group Meetings are
closed and only experts who are nominated by their National Bodies may
attend. Experts, in theory, are supposed to be pure experts without
any NB allegiance, but in practice they do have allegiances. All members
and experts, with exception of IL's, are appointed by their respective
National Bodies. NB's generally have similar organizational structures
from which the International members and experts are drawn. The British
like to call these national organizations "shadow groups."4 In the U.S., NCITS B10 is the shadow group for JTC1 SC17 and B10.6 is
the shadow group for SC17 WG1.5 ICMA through
their representative (e.g, myself) participates all four entities.
The process
First a New Work Proposal (NP) is made, and its level of approval may
be either JTC1 or SC17 depending on its scope of work. Besides approval
by a majority of members, at least five NBs must agree to work on the
standard for the NP to be accepted. After assignment to a WG by the
SC, a Project Editor (PE) is appointed whose responsibility is to prepare
the written standard in accordance with ISO guidelines using a template
supplied by ISO. In the first stage, a Working Draft (WD) is prepared
which is updated after each WG meeting to reflect decisions made at
the meeting. The initial WD usually has missing or incomplete information.
As the experts progress in analysis and data gathering, the WD becomes
more complete and stable.
Eventually the committee decides that standard is sufficiently stable
to take a National Body ballot within the SC. The WD then becomes a
Committee Draft (CD). The CD ballot asks NBs to approve, approve with
comments or disapprove the document. All disapprovals must contain the
rationale so the WG can resolve the issue. The WG provides a specific
response, accept or reject, to each comment, in a Disposition of Comments
document. The WG then decides whether a second CD ballot or Final CD
ballot is the next step.
When the WG believes all technical issues have been resolved, a Final
CD ballot within the SC is taken. The idea here is that this is the
final form of the Standard with the exception of minor technical or
editorial changes. The FCD ballot results are processed same as the
CD except that if a major technical change results from the ballot,
a second FCD or a new CD is required.
Once the FCD is approved and editorial and typo changes are made, the
FCD is taken to Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) ballot at
the JTC1 level. This is a short, two months, ballot and only a yes or
no vote is allowed. Any comments submitted with a vote are filed away
until the Standard is reviewed in its normal five-year review cycle.6 Unless of course, the FDIS does not garner sufficient votes to pass.7
Since the PE used the ISO template, it usually only takes two months
for the approved FDIS to be published by ISO.
There is a 125 page document detailing the directives and procedures
of ISO/IEC JTC1, thus this is only a very brief description of the essential
elements of the process.
Notes
1 IEC, International Electrotechnical Commission.
2 ISO and JTC1 have 186 Technical Committees, 536 Sub Committees, and
2,037 Working Groups.
3 Name was changed in 2000, formerly "ID Cards and Related Devices"
4 The U.S. calls them TAG's, Technical Advisory Groups.
5 JTC1 SC17 WG1 scope is physical characteristics, test methods, embossing,
and mag stripe.
6 Every international standard is reviewed in five year cycles to determine
if it should be withdrawn, revised, or maintained as is.
7 It is extremely rare that a normal FDIS would fail. The theory in
the process is that all technical problems are resolved through the
CD and FCD process. The vote for FDIS is a strategic one, namely does
the NB believe the standard is needed or not needed.