Consistent with the globalization of products, similar trends are happening in the world of standards, where standards are being harmonized across boundaries through organizations such as IEC and ISO but also between these two organizations as well.

I am now back from the IEC meeting for a bit more than a week so thought an update worth sharing.

How often does each of us wonder “is there a standard for that?” I know practically every project that I work on is driven by standards – either project specific and most often related to another standard from a standard developing organisation such as ISA or the IEC.

From the press release from HART Communication Foundation:

In the gold rush to Smart Grid, it's easy to get left out. In the last several major press releases about Smart Grid I've seen, one standards body has been conspicuous by its absence. That, of course would be ISA.

I received a news release from Tom Clary at Invensys this morning that got me thinking. It announced that IPS was hosting the ISA95 standard meetings next week:

65C/506A/PAS Project: IEC/PAS 62591 Ed.1 IEC/PAS 62591: Industrial communication networks - Fieldbus spec

David Mitchell, SVP IT Research at Ovum, comments on: The Open XML standards decision It emerged yesterday that ISO/IEC DIS 29500 should gain formal ratification as an ISO standard for documents, following the Ballot Resolution Process (BRM) meeting. This reverses the previous rejection of the standard in September 2007.

Chris Monchinski, from Automation Control Concepts introduced the WBF "Center for Batch Disease Control" (Dennis Brandl, Charlie Gifford, Paul Nowicki, Dave Chappell, Lynn Craig, Randy Dwiggins) to reduce the incidence of BBCS (Bad Batch Control Systems) and BOMS (Bad Operations and Management Systems) which is also sometimes called MESses.

The late morning session was opened by Rockwell's CTO, Sujeet Chand TCO and four big guns from the World of Standards. Joe Bhatia, president of ANSI, Frank Kitzantides, VP of IEC, James Lovegrove, managing director of the American Electronics Association, Europe, and Keith Williams, president and CEO of Underwriters Laboratories,...