On the Lifecycle Management of Standards

Sammanfattning: Standards are used everywhere in the modern world and are a fundamental part of a functioning society. But the creation and maintenance of international standards is not an easy task. In addition to the technical prerequisites that must exist to create a standard, there are also political, economic and cultural aspects that must be considered.
The present thesis does not interpret all these aspects in the creation and maintenance of international standards. The goal of the thesis is to assist the technical specialist who will participate in the process of creating a new global standard, with a map that describes the various steps involved in a standards life cycle, but also the interaction of the development team.
A composite model was created based on the work described in (Söderström, 2004) supplemented with the D-S-N process described in (Fomin, 2003). The composite model was then further developed into a modelling process using Six-Sigma methodology (Brassard, 2002), with requirements for input and output conditions for each process step.
To standardize the development process model each process step was complemented with suggested methods for the completion of each process step.
The developed process model, LMS-Lifecycle Management of Standards, can be applied for the development of global EDI standards in the automotive industry. The model can also be generalized to describe the standardization process where the development of software is included.
The author has been active in international standardisation groups as representative of the Swedish car industry for nine years. The elaborated model for a standardization lifecycle has been verified using the SASIG and Odette Sweden protocols from 2000-2007 and by the author's own experiences during standardization work on the global EDI standards ENGDAT V3, OFTP2 and PDQ V2.