Standardization News

Part 3: Maximizing the Value of Your Participation in Standards Development

A mindmap can help standards professionals to assess the complex connections of standards development, business benefits and the details of both: here's what to consider.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of standards to competitiveness. A lack of standardization can keep products and services from working effectively with other products and services or with available infrastructure. This can, in turn, discourage investment. On the other hand, the right standards can support a company's products and services and provide a platform for future offerings.

Failing to participate in relevant standards initiatives or participating without proper planning can be disastrous. But strategic participation can provide several benefits by:

Achieving these objectives presupposes that you are able to select which development initiatives to join and the extent of your participation. Guiding questions that will prepare you for participation include:

This analysis is enabled when standards professionals are involved in strategic planning within the company (see my previous article in this series, "Maximizing Input into Strategic Planning," in the May/June SN¹). Using the roadmapping technique (described in that article) helps in analyzing requirements, resources, timing issues and obstacles that can inform your standards participation.

But roadmapping is often product-specific and the standards professional likely must consider multiple negotiations crossing product lines. Cross-product input and your understanding of both technical and strategic issues may be strengthened by consistent interaction with your company's marketing, R&D, design and engineering, and product management units along with supply chain and alliance partners.

These groups may not consistently communicate with each other. Targeted technologies and alternative approaches may also be evolving. Getting the necessary input, particularly on potential changes and emerging requirements, will require both the active support of upper management and a communication tool. Mindmapping can be such a tool.

Promoted by Tony Buzan beginning in the early 1990s, mindmapping is a spider diagram that lays out, often in a hierarchical fashion branching off a central topic (in the illustration, negotiating position), complex facets of a system and how they interrelate. Figure 1 shows a simplified example of considerations going into standards negotiation.

A key benefit of a mindmap is visually detailing and communicating relevant issues and their interaction. A user can zoom in on one part of the map that may be most relevant to a needed source of input without losing the broader picture. The mindmap itself can stimulate shared understanding and collaboration and be further refined in discussion with stakeholders.

Building the Mindmap

Common questions regarding each node in the diagram that will allow further detailing of subtopics include:

The illustration suggests initial subtopics within focal areas likely needing to be addressed.

Focusing on negotiation-specific considerations, standards professionals should begin developing their mindmaps by assessing their own positions (incorporating input from their extended organization) and those of others at the table (an ongoing process as negotiations proceed). In trying to anticipate how others might negotiate, an observation² by Carl Cargill (now of Adobe) is useful. Based on his long experience in standards negotiation, Cargill suggests that stakeholders may wear multiple hats representing the following perspectives:

Moreover, participants, particularly in global standards development negotiations, are likely to be very mismatched, differing in important ways:

Questions for Planning the Negotiation

I suggest the following basic guiding questions for planning negotiation:

Standards negotiations can take significant time during which needs and priorities may change. These are signaled in the example mindmap as dynamic considerations and are informed by the scenario planning discussed in "Maximizing Input into Strategic Planning". Scenario planning systematically defines and evaluates strategic considerations for possible alternative operating environments based on key changed variables. Relevant here is the fact that technologies targeted by standards development initiatives are increasingly evolving and corporate operations and associated requirements including standards are subject to changing conditions, as are available resources. The two-headed arrow in the figure between current and potential future strategies reflects desired iteration as significant possible changes are identified or begin to manifest.

Further guiding questions, then, should include:

The next article in this series will consider how education and training can be designed to improve the skills and understanding of standards professionals.

References

1. Strauss, Jeffrey, "Maximizing Input into Strategic Planning," ASTM Standardization News, Vol. 43, No. 3, May/June 2015, pp. 34-39. The first part of this series is "The Elevator Speech," March/April 2015 SN.

2. Derived from Carl F. Cargill, "Why Standardization Efforts Fail," Journal of Electronic Publishing, Vol. 14, No. 1, Summer 2011.

At Northwestern University for 31 years, Jeffrey Strauss is acting director of Northwestern University's Center for Technology and Innovation Management within the university-wide Buffet Institute for Global Studies where he develops programs targeting cutting edge industry problems. He is particularly active in Northwestern initiatives supported by NIST that enhance attention to standards in business and engineering curricula. He has taught undergraduate, graduate and executive education courses on related subjects. He serves on multiple standards education committees and is vice chair for the Americas for the International Cooperation for Education and Standardization. He will be lead instructor on a MOOC related to standards education for IEEE next spring.