Impact of Standards! - New Insights

Overall Workshop goal

The overall goal of the Workshop is to develop a better understanding of the impact standards may have in the e-business and ICT sectors, and to validate different approaches to assess the impacts of standards. To this end, the focus will be on:

• presentations of the main results of the NO-REST project,
• presentations of relevant insights of external experts,
• discussions.

The Workshop will bring together experts from industry, academia, and SDOs to discuss the framework conditions for an impact assessment of ICT standards, the various dimensions of this impact, and how it could be measured. Therefore, results of the impact exercises will be presented and discussed, and an evaluation of various methodologies will be attempted.

The target group of the Workshop include members of the European and national standards organisations, as well as industry, NGOs, and regulatory bodies. The Worskhop should also be of interest to researchers active in standards and standardisation research.

Overall Project scope

The project NO-REST (Networked Organisations - REsearch into STandards and Standardisation) aims to investigate the applicability and dynamics of standards in the e-business, e-government and ICT sectors in order to develop tools for the assessment of their performance and of the impact they have on networked organisations.

Activities

NO-REST is looking at the application of standards, and analysing how standards, and their implementations, are subject to change incurred by the environment within which they are implemented. The project is going to devise an analytical framework for a causal model of such changes. This, in turn, will help to understand the nature of these changes and to allow for the derivation of conclusions for developing standards in the future, and of possible mechanisms to feed back these changes continuously into dynamic standards building.

The project is also analysing the various standards setting organisations, with a focus on how they react to - and influence - the dynamics of the environment within which they work. This includes an analysis of the 'credibility' standards setting organisation, i.e., to which extent does the origin of a standard influence its viability in the market place. The project is about to establish if, and how, a standard's origin affects its performance, and will set up guidelines helping those who wish to create a standard decide which standards setting organisation to select.

Finally, based on the above, NO-REST is developing and applying methodologies to help assess the performance of standards ex post and ex ante. This will ultimately contribute to guidelines and tools to evaluate the various impacts of standards.

For more detailed information on the NO-REST Project, please have a look at NO-REST web site.

Bernard Barani
EC DG INFSO D

Jorgen Friis
ETSI

Zygmunt A. Lozinski
IBM/Parlay

Jordi Molas-Gallart
SPRU

Knut Blind
FhG ISI

Tineke Egyedi
TU Delft

Richard Hawkins
TNO-STB

Kai Jakobs
RWTH Aachen