Автор работы: Пользователь скрыл имя, 12 Мая 2013 в 01:12, реферат
If there were no standards, we would soon notice. Standards make an enormous contribution to most aspects of our lives - although very often, that contribution is invisible. It is when there is an absence of standards that their importance is brought home. For example, as purchasers or users of products, we soon notice when they turn out to be of poor quality, do not fit, are incompatible with equipment we already have, are unreliable or dangerous. When products meet our expectations, we tend to take this for granted. We are usually unaware of the role played by standards in raising levels of quality, safety, reliability, efficiency and interchangeability - as well as in providing such benefits at an economical cost.
How the ISO system is financed
ISO's national members pay subscriptions that meet the operational cost of ISO's Central Secretariat. The subscription paid by each member is in proportion to the country's Gross National Product and trade figures. Another source of revenue is the sale of standards. However, the operations of ISO Central Secretariat represent only about one fifth of the cost of the system's operation. The main costs are borne by the member bodies which manage the specific standards' development projects and the business organizations which loan experts to participate in the technical work. These organizations are, in effect, subsidizing the technical work by paying the travel costs of the experts and allowing them time to work on their ISO assignments.
How ISO decides what standards to develop
Working through the ISO system, it is the sectors which need the standards that are at the origin of their development. What happens is that the need for a standard is felt by an industry or business sector which communicates the requirement to one of 3f2 ISO's national members. The latter then proposes the new work item to ISO as a whole. If accepted, the work item is assigned to an existing technical committee. Proposals may also be made to set up technical committees to cover new scopes of technological activity. In order to use resources most efficiently, ISO only launches the development of new standards for which there is clearly a market requirement.
The focus of the technical committees is necessarily specialized and
specific. In addition, ISO has three general policy development committees
with a more horizontal approach. Their job is to provide strategic guidance
for the standards' development work on cross-sectoral aspects. They
are: CASCO (conformity assessment); < 8 a href="
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Who develops ISO standards
ISO standards are developed by technical committees comprising experts on loan from the industrial, technical and business sectors which have asked for the standards, and which subsequently put them to use. These experts may be joined by others with relevant knowledge, such as representatives of government agencies, testing laboratories, consumer associations, environmentalists, and so on. The experts participate as national delegations, chosen by the ISO national member institute for the country concerned. These delegations are required to represent not just the views of the organizations in which their participating experts work, but of other stakeholders too. According to ISO rules, the member institute is expected to take account of the views of the range of parties interested in the standard under development and to present a consolidated, national consensus position to the technical committee.
How ISO standards are developed
The national delegations of experts of a technical committee meet to discuss, debate and argue until they reach consensus on a draft agreement. This is then circulated as a Draft International Standard (DIS) to ISO's membership as a whole for comment and balloting. Many members have public review procedures for making draft standards known and available to interested parties and to the general public. The ISO members then take account of any feedback they receive in formulating their position on the draft standard. If the voting is in favour, the document, with eventual modifications, is circulated to the ISO members as a Final Draft International Standard (FDIS). If that vote is positive, the document is then published as an International Standard.
Every working day of the year, an average of eleven ISO meetings are taking place somewhere in the world. In between meetings, the experts continue the standards' development work by correspondence. Increasingly, their contacts are made by electronic means and some ISO technical bodies have already gone over entirely to electronic working, which speeds up the development of standards and reduces travel costs.
When speed is of the essence
ISO standards are developed according to strict rules to ensure that they are transparent and fair. The reverse side of the coin is that it can take time to develop consensus among the interested parties and for the resulting agreement to go through the public review process in the ISO member countries. For some users of standards, particularly those working in fast-changing technology sectors, it may be more important to agree on a technical specification and publish it quickly, before going through the various checks and balances needed to win the status of a full International Standard. Therefore, to meet such needs, ISO has developed a new range of "deliverables", or different categories of specifications, allowing publication at an intermediate stage of development before full consensus: Publicly Available Specification (PAS), Technical Specification (TS), Technical Report (TR), International Workshop Agreement (IWA).
ISO's international partners
ISO collaborates with its partners in international standardization, the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission), whose scope of activities complements ISO's. In turn, ISO and the IEC cooperate on a joint basis with the ITU (International Telecommunication Union). Like ISO, the IEC is a non-governmental body, while the ITU is part of the United Nations Organization and its members are governments.The three organizations have a strong collaboration on standardization in the fields of information technology and telecommunications.
ISO's regional partners
Many of ISO's members also belong to regional standardization organizations. This makes it easier for ISO to build bridges with regional standardization activities throughout the world. ISO has recognized regional standards organizations representing Africa, the Arab countries, the area covered by the Commonwealth of Independent States, Europe, Latin America, the Pacific area, and the South-East Asia nations. Th 4bf ese recognitions are based on a commitment by the regional bodies to adopt ISO standards - whenever possible without change - as the national standards of their members and to initiate the development of divergent standards only if no appropriate ISO standards are available for direct adoption.
Specialist liaisons
ISO also liaises with some 550 international and regional organizations interested in aspects of ISO's standardization work. These include the 28 or so international standards-developing bodies outside the ISO/IEC system. Each of these bodies works in a specific area, usually with a United Nations mandate; an example is the World Health Organization. ISO and the IEC together produce about 85% of al 8 l Intern 943 ational Standards, and these other specialized bodies account for the rest.
Special products
In addition to International Standards and the "new deliverables", ISO develops guideline documents, manuals for developing countries, standards compendia - as paper products and CD-ROM's - handbooks and a whole range of standards-related publications. ISO also publishes two magazines: the monthly ISO Focus which presents an overview of ISO's activities, and ISO Management Systems - The International Review of ISO 9000 and ISO 14000, published six times a year.