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How standards organizations can and should work together: revisiting the interoperability of technical document publishing Recording
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How standards organizations can and should work together: revisiting the interoperability of technical document publishing Recording
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Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
Good evening.
This February 14 to some of you. Good morning to those of you joining us on the 15th of the month. Thank you for participating in this session of NISO Plus 2023. I'll introduce myself in a moment. But first, let's talk a little bit about this session and our valuable speakers this evening. This session is discussing how standards organizations can and should work together.
Revisiting interoperability of developing standards. Your presenters are going to focus on the values gained from interoperability from a few different viewpoints. We will first hear from Yukiko Kotani, a specialist in the system and international standards development unit at the Japanese Standards Association in Tokyo. Ms. Kotani will give us a view of the standards interoperability in Japan and Asia in general.
Our second speaker is ammar bin Ahmed, a construction industry SME. Currently serving as the vice chair of the ASTM international board. Mr bin Ahmed will speak to global market issues of interoperability and overall standards value. He is based in Dubai. Third, we will hear from Nicola flury, co-founder and managing partner of the Arctic advisors based in Switzerland.
Nikola is recently retired after long service as the deputy Secretary General and acting Secretary General of ISO, the International Organization for standardization headquartered in Geneva. To close our session, Robert Wheeler, director of publishing technologies at ASME and co-chair of two activities on technical publishing of standards and I. Lesley west, director of product management at ASTM international, will speak to the technical challenges of interoperability between standards groups as well as facilitate any questions from you are attendees.
So thank you so much for stopping by. Thank you and welcome to all of you and welcome to you. Ms. cattani hello, everyone. My name is yukiko otani from Japanese Standards Association. I'm working for the International standards development unit. So today I'm happy to talk about the interoperability of standards from there, mainly from the perspective of Japan and Asia.
And I'm also her, although I'm in the standards unit, I also have a long term experience in sales and publications. So I'm going to have her. I also going to have a talk. I'm also going to talk about the sales and customers' perspective to talk about this topic. So first I would like to introduce our organization, Japanese Standards Association.
So we are non-governmental SDO that is developing Japanese national standards called the Japanese industrial standards or our ges. And we have been in business since 1945 and we are also the distribution agent of the various standards, whether they are national, regional or international standards. So we are part of the global network of standards organization, and that is why we also have a long term relationship with various global international standards organization like ASTM international and ACB, and not just for the National standards, are not just national standardization.
We are also deeply committed to the International standardization of eyes on an issue both the governance and technical committee level. And we also have a strong partnership with the Japanese national standards organization jic, which is the Japanese member to us on an issue, international standards organizations. So now I also like I also like to talk about Japanese businesses.
What are the promising areas? What are the high interests for Japanese, Japanese businesses in industry and companies? So these are the key ones that were identified by the external survey in Japanese, by the Japanese mass media. So maybe, maybe most of the key words are not really surprising for you, like the SDGs and DKS and r and subscriptions.
All of these are very familiar words for you. But what is interesting for this survey is that the DMP, the data management platform and the personalization have received a higher interest in the last half of in the second half of the year in 2022. So DMP, the data management and personalization have been more interesting for Japanese businesses. So these so these areas that we need to address the standards organization as well.
So now what are the main challenges for Japanese businesses in the next one or two years? So although this survey is a little bit old, one conducted in 2021, but I think it's still relevant to the Japanese companies even today. And 50, according to the survey, 50% of the Japanese companies responded to the trade barriers and customs are the main challenges for their businesses.
And if you also look at the fourth place and fifth place, the supply chain risk management and the digitalization of products and services are also the major challenges for their businesses in Japan. So these are the main challenges that we also need to respond as a major standards organization in Japan. So now what are the challenges and opportunities for GSAS an sto?
So, of course, we need to respond. We need to tackle the digital transformation of standards and standards development, not only because our customers are also seeking the digital transformation of some of the products and services and the businesses. And also we need to make sure that delivery of the right contents, the right information in the right timing and by the right platforms. So and also the personalization of the products and services and information according to the various needs of the customer.
So we need to be a customer. We need to take a customer centric approach and for the customers, global trade and resilience in supply chain. So these are the challenges and opportunities for gsa, the standards organization. So I also like to talk a little bit about the examples of the customer needs according to our own customers as well, us, according to our partner organizations.
So one thing is that the finding of the right content and the right information. So for example, there are voices like which standards are relevant to our products and services and which parts of our standard are requirements and recommendations that are relevant to our products and services. Where can I find all the requirements to comply with the regulations?
And I want to be notified when the relevant standards or even requirements are changed. Why were these requirements change in the latest version of the standards? So what is the background? Where is the rationale of the changes in the standards? And another example is a comparison between the standards, whether they are now whether there are standards across the standards, across national standards or across the region or standards.
So I'm looking for example, I'm looking for the relevant standard for standards or national standards or regional standards, international standards to be able to export my products to another country. And I also want to know the differences between a Japanese standard and a foreign standard. Are they different or are they identical? And not just only for the standards. I also want to know how different or how common that requirements are between a Japanese standard and the foreign standard.
So these are the comparison needs from the customers. So these are just some examples of our customers' needs. And for that, we think that digitalization and digital transformation of standards and standards development are quite important for our businesses. And for success for x. And we I think that the interoperability across the region is quite key. For example, customers may need to change the production sites or partners from one country to another more frequently and more urgently, perhaps considering the current political situation in the world.
And also the implication is that our customers may need to be able to access and use the contents and information of the standards from another countries and other regions. And in such situations, they don't just didn't simply have a lot of material spending, a lot of time to read, interpret, interpret and apply the standard manually. So everything should be more digital, everything should be more automatic and destination, their customer destination might be any country in any region.
So if we talk about Japanese companies, it's not about just inside Asia, it could be anywhere. So these need to be so. So interoperability across the region of the standard is quite important. And if I also talk a little bit about Asia, at least as long as I know the interoperability of the standards inside the Asian region was to be further discussed, because I am not aware of the major discussion inside the Asian level, the East Asian level, about the interoperability of standards and of standards and standards development, although we have many discussions in the International level, mainly in Isola IC.
So I believe that the more regional collaboration could be made to contribute to the International discussion and interoperability of the standards and standards development. And before I close my presentation, I also mentioned a bit about the challenges due to interoperability of standards. From the perspective of translation, just maybe a little bit divergent from the main topic, but the translation is because my because it is my person and this is my joy.
So I can't leave without touching on the translation topic. So one example, I actually have seen in our translation, English translation of the Japanese standards or the Japanese translation of the English documents are there is one expression that might cause misuse or mistranslation or misunderstanding. For example, if you say more than three in english, it means 3 is not included.
So it could mean like four or five, six or seven. And if you, for example, Google Translate for more than 3 to get the Japanese translation of the more than three, then you will get the words 3 itu. So it means more than although it comes after the figure. So the opposite order from English. But in some cases, it could mean more than three in Japanese. But depending on the context, it could also mean three or more.
And I have seen a couple of times in our products that there is a misuse of this issue to me, more than three or three or more. So it could be it could mean both, depending on the context in Japanese and which it's quite confusing. So this ambiguity and misuse might cause a consequence for standard users. So I wonder when standard is related to each other across the region, across the countries.
I just wonder how this ambiguity and misuse are going to be reduced. So so that is my interesting question. And I guess that the data scientists, maybe maybe they already have the answer. But but personally, I think it's this question is quite interesting, especially when we talk about the operability and the relationship between the standards across the region and the country.
And even inside East or Asia, there is a diversity in languages. For example, this slide shows the exact same Chinese character, both in Japanese and Chinese, but in Japanese and Chinese, they have a totally different meanings. For example, this Chinese character in Japanese means hot water, while in Chinese it means soup. So how do we relate each standard and describe the information when we are so when our languages are so diverse, which is quite interesting.
So maybe that's something to be discussed when we talk about the interoperability between the standards across the region. So the takeaways of my presentation is our businesses in Japan are seeking solutions for their global trade, resilience in supply chain and digitalization. And the interoperability of the standards across the region is becoming more important for our customers in the global supply chain.
And the regional collaboration, as well as the International collaboration of standards organizations, will help us to seek interoperability of the standards. So these are the takeaway for my presentation. So if you have any questions or comments, I'm happy to answer your question or comment, so please feel free to contact me.
Thank you very much for your attention. Hello, everyone, this is Ahmed. I'm currently vice chair of ASTM international board of directors. I specialize in construction, manufacturing, building materials. I'm located in Dubai. Thank you for joining me. It's a great pleasure to share my experience joining with all of you.
Thank you. So my focus is mainly on the standards and impact of the standards, how they. Our journey towards the start of the standards until the end. What is the impact of the standards and industry and overall the region. Why change its changes? We always thought that change is inevitable, but change is always a very challenging topic for especially when it comes to old habits, construction, manufacturing, which is one of the oldest industry.
This is one of the biggest challenges we face in our region. Coming from a multicultural, multinational society, you have several things to deal with. And multi and the dynamics of multicultural society is that it brings so many good things, but also we have a certain constraints along that. So it brings multinational standards. So our challenge is, was when you have so much of information, know how technology is coming through.
How do you differentiate yourself from oneself and make sure that you are going to become the leader in the market? And coming back to that was, we realize beginning of our journey, the beginning was to challenge the status quo of our own industry. What we realized when we started working on making our action locally, our products were challenging. The quality did not meet the standards.
So what does it mean by sonics? And I think everybody has a different perspective of time that's coming with so much of an experience originally. But we realized that we have a certain standard, an industry, and we follow that and that was OK. But the minute we start making local product, they were expecting the local product to have international standards. What that created the question saying, wow, now we have to change.
That means we have to come out of a comfort zone and start looking at things differently. So one of the challenges was moving construction materials in different markets and also addressing the local market issues. Therefore, we realized that necessity is the mother of invention and we will start looking for solutions. One of the key things to this was how to bridge the gap between the quality and the standards.
And then we realized if you want to be the leader, you have to be the best. You have to challenge yourself, your team, your whole thought process and also have the stakeholders, your owners of the organization and the customers, architects, contractors, everybody to join this journey. And that was a tall order to address. But I think given the will of our team, we realized that we, our benchmark is to become the market leader.
As you've seen in the uae, everything is based on high, high performance, based on high quality standards. Therefore there was no room for error. We focus on developing how to made in UAE local quality to international level. And for that we have to learn what the standard means. We have to understand the language of the Chinese and the power of China and how they affect in the product processes, sales, marketing, commercial manufacturing, safety, people.
Everything has to be we have to literally reinvent the wheel to understand that what we have learned now, some of the market demands, market wants something different. Therefore, the goal was to overcome acceptance of the products in the country and globally and understand the latent talents of the customers and the region and what will apply to region in the country. What is the expertise to educate and assess this? All things we keep changing.
And it was it was a time. So much of construction was going on, at least in Dubai, in the UAE. And probably we have to continue the production and make those changes as we develop our new products and solutions to the market. And what happens when you do this. It may sound very easy when I'm talking about now, but frankly, it was one of the most challenging journey of my whole career.
When you see this, we have to be mindful of the whole organization surface and we realize that the tip of the iceberg is only a small part of what we see. But there are so many underlying layers, undercurrents. You are dealing with the status quo of people who have been in the industry for 50 or 60 years. And you always hear that we have always done this that way. We don't set the bar, we don't want to set the bar too high.
We are different. It's not my problem, you know, we won't that won't work here. All the challenges we face with the team, both internally and externally, with the customers, and nobody was ready to accept. And the only thing was, OK, if you want to be the best, you've got to go in this direction. And we started looking for that on the line. And when you start further you realise, oh, even the cost of work, poor quality, how does it affect the industry.
So we have to improve the. Quality of the product and solutions and services. We provide also reduce the cost. And again, when you start deep diving into the production and start deep diving into the sales commercial aspect of the industry, we realize, well, we have to actually start from scratch again. It's not easy for any manufacturer or owner to develop this.
After the investment. This was being done actually after investment was completed. So it was a double challenge for us. That means we required funding, more funding, and we also required a moral support both from the stakeholders and also from the team so that, you know, to inspire and motivate for teams to take over. So the quality, the cost of poor quality was when we diagnosed this, we realized that operational damage, lots of future business pricing or pricing errors, excessive inventory.
Everything was under underestimated when we said, if you have to change then we have to change you in this part of the business. So that means and if you're going to produce one standard and we already have another three standard. We were managing three different standards. You have ACM in business and internet produce on the same line. That means the stock was increasing.
That was how do you manage how do you make the change outside your normal business system? That means your architects, contractor, consultant authorities, how do you bring this know how to them? It was a long, long journey, but at the same time, every individual in the organization would focus on this. So we have to invest in training the people from the production line to the commercial director.
Everybody was trained to understand how what is the quality means in certain standards and how do we make sure that when we do the product testing and certification, how we can sell this to a bigger audience, not only in the UAE but also outside the UK, to create a mark of made in UAE. This is how it was achieved. Then we realised, yeah, everything is a cost, you know, when you go for a changeover you have to think about how do you make these changes?
Does a customer churn cost with damages, projects, testing costs, tree works, inspections? All this also required support from the investors. But at the same time, if you don't do this the discovery high, that means we realized that between 15% to 25% there's a total of hidden cost to make sure that we lead this in a sustainable way. You have to make those changes, handle the customer complaints efficiently, re-engage with the customers, understand the gaps between the market.
And also this affected our receivables also because customers think, oh, you have a new product, maybe after test and try the product then will give the money. All those things we started learning as we went to the journey. What I've been saying. What happened next was what standards can facilitate divorce. Also, we have to communicate.
We realize that it gave us an opportunity to say that there is a consistent culture no matter where we go. You know, it was easier to analyze the production line and understand the gaps in the industry. There was a predictable assembly with reliable outcomes. That means we know what we are going to produce. And we know what the results, want to install. And there's reliability and trust behind this harmonized standards as the basis for technical regulation.
That means also it helps not only the production line or storage, but also the storage and warehouse of the customers we manage in the same way that they have minimum double standards products, one harmonized standards products, technical support, which will enable to act cohesively instead of separately. This is how it all happened. Wherever where available, certify components to ensure acceptance that every component was tested and certified so that the overall assembly was certified to achieve a performance of infrastructure acoustics.
All these were achieved through this kind of process. And it was clearly visible. That means we have today about when we started it was 0% market share in terms of specification. Currently, the market rate is about 60% to 65% standards in building material construction under 65%, which is pretty high compared to other standards. And also, as we went along, there is a more predictable process.
Take over the pain points from the customer and also from the commercial team. We could root analyze the root cause. That means when the product is stalled, even after five years or eight years, you can actually go back and check what was the raw material, what was the who was the supervisor in production line, how it was dispatch, which customer who Stole it.
And there was a lot of trust built up through this in the whole product line and the process that people and customers realized it is worth buying this sustainable, reliable product from one source rather than multiple sources and from one stop shop. All involved started seeing the value of the customers, architects, contractors for this and they realize that it gives them the benefit in security. It gives them the high quality, cost and quality control.
And also they realize that the performance were better and more reliable and trusted. And it was very clearly how to install. That means now we have when we did this kind of development of the product, you also have to change the construction methods, the installation dimensions, which is 1.2 to 1.2. To know all these things for metric to imperial metrics has to be changed and educated to the market.
That was continuous improvement program to be built in the industry with the customer demand and also with the production line. Clearly in central supply chain it was must to do this and it's a still continuous process. Broad benefit of following standards. Communication is the key. What we realized was, if we don't communicate, then there's an oversight of things people assume.
And it's the same like before, and they go ahead with installation. So we have to actually start communicating the differences between channels. Differences between session methods. The differences in the packaging of this material, or the products which were shipped across standards. Critical information from point to point of the workflow regulations.
Authorities can more easily manage all sides of public works department. They still don't realize this helps them. It made their processes easier to understand that OK, this is a trusted reliable source was taken of the lead and to give them the final solution. So that it can validate on the certification and testing authorities around the region. Integration swift once they realize this was there, it was very quick.
Everybody started understanding. But it took so quite while it took us about two years to implement this. In the whole process, different parties is leverage information. People realize the value behind it. Shipping product means your work is done and you have no more impact to make the standards of the product communicate as it makes the journey to the final decisions.
And so when we had the shipping codes through SFP, it made it very easy that all the courts were homogeneous. Even the port authorities realized this is better and helps them to reduce the overlap and speed of the process of online, online booking and developing the process are processing this dependable solutions bring security to all participants from solo to c-suite secure, predictable goals, and also to add a lot of confidence to the sales pitch.
Sales pitch could actually talk about this to the developer, saying that if you use a certified third party tester Certified Systems under ACM, you could actually get a premium margin of between 2% to 3% on your development products and the properties, which was very much evident. What we see through our journey was how was the global impact? This was all this while it was local. So when we started shipping our products around the region, we have to have same standards.
You know, we realized that some other regions were having different standards and we are making the difference. And so we have to actually educate other regions also saying this is the best solution because it's a reliability. You can have a good customer. So you can backtrack the whole thing and the integrity of systems product under one testing certification body. So that helped a lot and manufacturers could rely the quality has been met with when the standards are followed multiple when we have multiple farms from around the world manufacturers can have the same quality same quality product standards without reinventing the wheel.
That means they also able to reduce the cost trust for the products with implants and the region without overlap of cost and the technology. Local regions offer a standard, often follow more international standard to facilitate this manufacturing convenience. I think this is one of the things we realized. There was a gap between the local standards and also international side all the time.
One focus was for us was to make sure that make in E was resilient. It resonates with the quality, the performance of the industry and people in the by product in. You should be able to say that this is a similar product quality in states or Europe or Australia and that gives you a high benchmark for the industry and overall region itself because people start seeing the value of making around those standards where you could actually ensure the products and solutions.
What they're buying from one source using communication label standards can reduce carbon footprint. We also realized that once you have one common standards for the region or the manufacturing facilities, you can actually reduce the overlaps, double handling of the products and your raw material. Everything can be managed and reduce the carbon footprint by engaging only in the design stage with the specification. And the contract can deliver to educate that this standards will help them and speed up the construction.
Also, you can have the recycled content or period of time. Costs are kept low within interoperable standards. Dubai can follow the same specification. And so basically what it means is if you manufacture in Dubai, that's China to be able to match in Vietnam or Australia or Germany or states or Korea. They should not be different. And I think that was the biggest challenge for us and we achieved that.
And that is today 40% of the production goes toward the export and it is visible for the industry that the products are of UAE made in UAE and globally. And they see it is a high value in this and also certification behind it to back it up. Forward all the way. Recommendation to standard publishers how to make standards information more interoperable. Basically I think, increased conversation between the standard organization stakeholders present information in and on a common platform.
Understanding a culture of challenges which as we know that we have. Being in a multicultural society, we see that is one of the biggest challenges. Communication key to have one common culture in the industry increase opportunity to present information in other languages. That means in several languages you can produce the same information, so the end user have access to information to help them make the right decision based on that with complementary coursework to explain requirements about the global adoption.
And also we realized once we set up the standards in the US for the STM standards people where it was easy for it to adopt into the region within the industry and also R&D became the hub for the RMB in Germany that the standards were applied from UAE into the Germany, the same industry. From the knowledge we gained in the Middle East. So it was quite an honor for us to hear that when we see that people realize the work that's been done in uae, but we never thought of.
But we could achieve that through a lot of resilience, collaboration, managing the team, talent, training the talent, retaining the retraining the old talent, upskilling the existing talent, and educating everybody throughout the supply chain industry about the standard options of why you should look at the standards and how does it help? But this is how it was Dubai. This is just a picture to express where Dubai was in 2005.
Where it is now. Now, a lot of these buildings today, they have standards in terms of the structure in terms of the fire, in terms of acoustics, in terms of exterior paneling, in terms of even the elevators. So in a lot of ways in London, they have 55, 50 elevator shops in the tallest building in the world done under ASTM E119 standards were installed. At that time, they didn't even have all the process manufacturing facilities, so that all components were assembled and tested outside the area.
But they saw a new way to achieve the performance. Clearly, the future is great that this can be adopted in any other developed, underdeveloped nation. It's a success story. And we have seen we've gone through the learning curve together as a team member because it will require all the players in all industry from the production manager, supervisor, your purchasing officer, the commercial director, technical director, your customers know everybody needs to be involved in this and it's a long journey.
But certainly once the people see the benefit of this, which they do eventually and they realize that it is the right decision to do and help them to have a sustainable, reliable products. Looking to the future. What we see a new standards can make the world better. Clearly, standards can present information in more efficient ways, encouraging more innovation. Synovitis on the wall can be trained to write for a bright, bright and better future.
Our world is changing. Our world is changing very fast. And there are oceans of knowledge to harness and improve on material needs to change. Even the materials are changing a lot. And we need to adapt to the new sustainable material without damaging the existing resources within the countries or imports or reduce the imports of the other raw materials. New external needs to be retrained for new industries like additive manufacturing.
You can see there's a new innovation happening in this industry. The whole talent needs to be reskilled, upskill again. Train on the similar new standard to manage industry in the construction or 3D printed construction industry also has to look into this saying, OK, how do we connect with the new opportunities in the industry to do the 3D printing in the construction market and have a sound data to support that under the certification of our final thoughts from I say this from desert to the global because what we learned was actually done in the desert Thanks to SDM team and board and our members who made my team's journey, my journey easier, it helps us to understand what were the pain points for us, but also made us very resilient, agile and give us a thought process saying that, OK, if you do the things the right way and also do the things that the quality control is, it means you need to look at quality, assuming that it's your personal interest, not just the interest of the industry, but the people, so that you can add value and contribute towards that.
We take better care of our resources. Clearly, that will help us make a better, safer, more sustainable world for all of us. Better manager of structures we live in. Refurbishment of existing buildings is managed better with more valuable results that will last much longer into the future than possible. Greater ease of global supply chains, a greater efficiency allows industry to accomplish much more standard are a huge part of our lives.
Clearly, there is no doubt about that. And we learned this through the hard way. But we realize that's a must. Most of us just don't know this until we get involved in this process. Then we see them the potential oceans of opportunities everywhere. And this once you learn the senate, you actually start leading the market.
You become the market leader. People start speaking differently. And I think today we see that everybody recognizes this innovative step where the whole team has taken for the industry the value chain. Customer benefit from the end. Users benefit from that. And overall the tourists as well. So thank you very much.
Thanks to ACM team and thank you to the board and thank you, the participants for online. And if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask us. Look forward to see you soon sometime. Thank you. Good day, everyone. Before I start, I would like to thank the planning committee of this nice Plus 2023 conference for inviting me to speak today.
It's really an honor. My name is Nicola Fleury. I'm the co-founder and managing partner of a company based in Switzerland called strategic advisors. But I'm probably most known in the standards community as the former Deputy Secretary General and acting Secretary General of ISO, the International Organization for Standardization that I left recently after 24 years of contribution.
The mission of my new company is to help standards organizations increase their efficiency and become more performing platforms for the development and dissemination of standards and content in standards. The mission is also to help businesses and governments put standards at the core of their strategies and tactics to capture the benefits of standards and to maximize with them the impact and the value they aim at generating.
This immediately brings us to the importance of interoperability of technical documents, which is the subject of this session. Let's start by looking at the context we are in today. It is not new that businesses must deal with an incredible amount and variety of rules, regulations, standards, and other specifications and requirements from many different sources.
But the challenge is that this represents for them is probably more visible than ever into this context. Let's look at the slow economic growth and the risks of recession. The increased, tensed geopolitical situation. The questioning of globalization, of trade, the current trends in regionalization, and the offshoring of manufacturing and supply chains, which is forcing to reapply expertise and know how.
There's also the impact of the energy crisis, especially in Europe, resulting in higher costs and requiring businesses to become more energy efficient. There's also the impact of climate change, the need for sustainability with expectations of investors and stakeholders on the demonstration by businesses of the environmental, social and governance performance. The need for resilience.
And of course, the ever fast development in technology and digitization, which is pushing for an acceleration of the innovation and product design cycles. All these elements in today's context have put standards at the front row and given them a new strategic dimension. Standards organization are taking the opportunities that these contexts offer to promote extensively standards as solutions and tools to improve performance, to innovate, to reduce environmental impact, and to mitigate risks.
In such a context. The interoperability of documents across different regions, different sectors, different industry is obviously a must for businesses willing to capture the benefits of standards. However we end up there yet. Access to standards remains difficult and complex.
It requires multiple sources of supply access to multiple platforms. Content are available in different formats and with different levels of rights. And when it comes to working with standards, it may become very challenging, if not impossible, to surge, bring together, compare or mixed content from various sources. This becomes even more problematic when content from various sources do complement each other and needs to be integrated to be properly used.
Let's look at the history. It is FAIR to say that the ISO XML project, which was launched in 2011, in which I was directly involved and which resulted in the hosts the ISO standard stuck set. What a success in terms of interoperability between standards organizations. Indeed exhausts was rapidly adopted by a number of national standards bodies to structure the documents.
ISO SDS drove to the ISO SDS that ISO adopted as well, and which was designed for use by both national standards bodies. And standards development organization. ISO developed its online pricing platform for original ISO standards and the number of national standards bodies developed their own platforms as well. However, the benefits of the investment of XML from a standard user perspective were contained.
An explanation of this situation is probably in that the primary objective of the ISO XML project was to equip ISO and its members with more advanced publishing technology before solving standard users problem today there are a number of projects that are focusing on the development and use of technology to support new ways of developing and providing access to standards content.
One of the projects which is attracting the attention today is the joint ISO and ice mark project. Contrary to the isaacman project, the primary objective of smart is clearly to address customer needs. But is this project going to substantially bring benefits to users and reduce the challenges that they are facing, especially the challenges of interoperability?
As we describe it a little bit before. I'm afraid not. To achieve interoperability standards, organization would have to work together to adopt common technologies and approaches to access standards content. Most project to date are having the scopes limited to each organization, each with their own area of responsibility.
While interoperability requires organizations to work together. But also I think that there are more fundamental issues that standards organizations need to address. So that they can really solve existing and potential future problem. Sorry the first issue relates to the understanding of clients' needs.
By nature, the very reason for the existence of standards organizations is to be a supporting the development of standards through the creation of a consensus between multiple stakeholders. Success for them is considered once consensus is achieved and standards is created and published. Success is, therefore, when a solution to a problem is developed. This explains probably why most investments made by standards organization.
Go to how to identify opportunities to develop new standards to be developed, how to improve stakeholders, participations to technical committees, how to improve processes for the development of standards and to reduce time to market. Online ordering, for example, is being considered as an enabler to such objectives. On the opposite.
If the concepts of standards used everywhere is often a strategic objective. Very little is done to understand how to do this and invest accordingly. In the case of ISO, for example, the decentralized structure makes that the responsibility to serve standards users is left to national standards bodies. This makes that the knowledge of standard users is left to national standards bodies with no process to bring up market intelligence.
That could help understand user needs and how to address them. And should such a process formally exist, it would still be challenging to collect intelligence considering that. Let's stay with the ISO example. Lesson 50% of the 167 members of ISO do conduct marketing and sales activities, with less than 20% of them contributing to 80% of the revenues. In other words, for most standards, organization, commercial activities and customer orientations say standards, user orientation are not part of their DNA.
There is often no consistent direct connection with standard users and standards organizations keep guessing what users want. It is therefore imperative that standards organizations together invest in market research and systematic approaches to develop their knowledge of the market and their understanding about how standards are used and needs to be used. And from this they will have to implement processes which will make that this intelligence is injected into the strategic decision making process, like any other elements of the core value chains which are considered into the decision making process.
A second issue, in my view, relates to the what I would call an architectural innovation. Architectural innovation is about changing the relationship between the components of the system. That is the system architecture. Architectural innovation is about a complete rethinking of the way the pieces of an organization do fit together. Architectural innovation is different from incremental innovation, which improves one specific piece of an organization.
Architectural innovation requires to invest in New skills and people required to build entirely different ways of approaching a market. Digital transformation of standards organization is on the top of the agenda. There is no way to counter this particular fact, but a number of organizations are still at the very early stage of what digital transformation is about.
In some cases, digital information is still confused with it. Digital transformation is considered as the set of IT projects within the organization. With the governance left to it directly. Also it is considered that the extensive use of IT tools. And platform is what digital transformation is about. However, digital transformation happens by the transformation of the whole organization and its culture.
Standards organization should properly embrace what digital transformation is. What it means from an organizational transformation perspective and how this should translate from a governance, resources, skills and change management perspective. They should take the steps to integrate fully the digital transformation disciplines and plan the move to transform their DNA in that respect.
The third issue relates to changes to the current business models. Over the past decades, standards organizations have invested extensively in technology. Just to take a few example, they move from offset printing to on demand digital printing. They move from sending standards by post to distributing standards on the internet.
They move from composition to SGML and they move from SGML to XML, for example. They implemented advanced office authoring tools. And they are very recently very critical projects which have been conducted by a number of key standardization organization. However, in terms of what is being delivered, very little has changed. Standards organizations still deliver documents with little flexibility with regards to how standards users want to do and can do with them.
In some cases, access is still provided with a number of restrictions, limited their use today for most of the existing projects in relation to smart standards, priority and resources are allocated to the technological side of things. Discussions around business model are expected to happen once approaches and solutions have been developed. But the problem with this approach is that the opportunities offered by smart have the potential to dramatically change the very nature of Sanders organization, for example, making them move from standards publishers to data producers.
Smart also has the potential to affect the perceptions of core elements of the business model, such as copyright protection or the current organization of the distribution of content. Because of their current business models are so profoundly anchored in their culture that structures standards organization must discuss the impact of SMART on their business model as a matter of priority.
They should look at those projects from the angle of the new opportunities they potentially offer. They should develop a vision around how they see standard users work with their content and how this will contribute to continue to properly fund their activities. If not offering more revenues opportunities. To conclude achieving interoperability and standards.
Allowing users to work in a homogeneous manner with data coming from very estrogenic sources must be a key consideration for standards organization. However, if standards organizations need to work together to help achieve this goal, they also need to step back and reflect on their way of achieving their mission and certainly reinvent themselves. Capitalizing on their unique assets, of course.
Achieving what standards users expect today require indeed a broad reflection on what the market is and how standards organizations do work in order to serve the market properly. Developing a strong customer orientation, understanding how the structure of the organization can be played with and turned around to better meet market expectations. And being open to changes in business will allow some organizations to stay relevant and continue to serve the purpose of contributing to everyone's life.
This is a key moment and turning point for that. Thank you.