CommLedgeStandards
This domain (which is part of our top areas of changes) has always been one of our main topic of attention and work. The main reasons for this:
- The impact of standardisation can be overwhelming (just think about mobile, internet standards).
- Standards create consensus and open new routes for product creation.
CommLedge and Standards
Unless you are a arch-dominant player in a world of silos (which is rarely the case for anyone now, even for the big ones like Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, etc.), most everything will end up in standards before you can do most of what you want. Just to take a simplistic example: it takes over 200 standards to make an iPhone and start to compete on specific, differentiating features with competitors whose products also include the same 200 standards. So what ? Actually, here again the situation seems to be changing, even if less rapidly than in ICT, consensus building still being the norm (!) and taking time.
In the last ten years, ICT standardization has lost ground for two main - and related - reasons. On the one hand, the software product life-cycles have been drastically reduced, not leaving time to go through long processes for creating consensus-based standards: it was the time of mushrooming for lean and mean, narrow-mission-oriented standards organizations.One the other hand, the creation of eco-systems around large companies (and their associated environments: SDKs as well as Intellectual Property regimes, etc.) have favoured ‘semi-proprietary’ solutions over generic ones.
In the last ten years, ICT standardization has lost ground for two main - and related - reasons. On the one hand, the software product life-cycles have been drastically reduced, not leaving time to go through long processes for creating consensus-based standards: it was the time of mushrooming for lean and mean, narrow-mission-oriented standards organizations.One the other hand, the creation of eco-systems around large companies (and their associated environments: SDKs as well as Intellectual Property regimes, etc.) have favoured ‘semi-proprietary’ solutions over generic ones.
This trend may stop, first because of the cost of large and dispersed standards efforts for companies, but more importantly because the need for large and complex systems (as pointed above as Smart X) drive strong requirements on ICT technologies and architectures and thus make a better case for standardized solutions. To be followed (and CommLedge is involved there).
Recent activities
ETSI has launched a Specialist Task Force (STF 561) to address the means to foster the involvement of citizens in standardisation related to Smart Cities to which CommLedge is contributing.
