ABSTRACT: Standards, Cycles and Evolution: Learning from the Past in a New Era of Change

Andrew Updegrove

6/05/2005
(Original Publish Date: 5/25/2005)

History includes times of both gradual evolution, as well as sudden revolutionary change. Standard setting experienced a burst of revolutionary change in the late 1980s that led to the development of a new type of standard setting organization (the consortium) when the information technology industry found the traditional, global standard setting infrastructure to be inadequate. Today, the consortium infrastructure is proving to be inadequate to the demands of a modern, networked world, and new structures will need to evolve in order to meet those needs.