Standards an standardisation
Standards are essentially ‘agreed ways of doing things’. The point of a standard is to provide a reliable basis for people to share the same expectations about a product, process, system, or service. Standards have two important characteristics: they provide a guide for behaviour, setting the expectations that organisations should adhere to; they also provide a guide for judging that behaviour, allowing people to understand whether their expectations have been met, enabling them to place their trust wisely. (For more details on how standards are developed, see section 5 [link])
Standards address a wide spectrum of issues that are relevant to our everyday lives. These range from specifying the technical requirements that enable us to connect to the internet via WIFI networks, to setting out guidance on corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability.
Some standards are written such that an external party can check whether they have been adhered to, through a conformity assessment procedure. Independent assurance providers can test and certify the conformity of products, processes and services against standards, should an organisation seek it.
The result of a conformity assessment can be reported publicly, to demonstrate trustworthiness and build public trust. Conformity can also be communicated through labels such as BSI’s Kitemark, the UK’s UKCA mark, or the European CE mark which demonstrate that a product conforms to the relevant regulations.
Aside from high-risk contexts such as the manufacture of medical devices, external assessment and certification is not a requirement for declaring conformity with a standard. Organisations can also declare their own compliance with certain standards, via a conformity attestation.
Participation in the development and use of standards is voluntary (though they can have important links to regulation see section 3 [link]). This voluntariness is a defining characteristic of the kinds of standards the AI Standards Hub focuses on, influencing how these standards are developed as well as the shape of the resulting standards.
Because the use of standards is voluntary, they need to be established in a way that ensures that they can gain wide acceptance, mainly by organisations that will use them but also from the individuals and organisations who will be affected by them. If standards are not seen to be convenient or beneficial to users, or society more broadly, they simply would not be used.
For this reason, the standards development process – known as standardisation – is a process of consensus building. The standards that result from these processes express what parties involved have managed to agree upon. An important aspect of the standards development process is that it provides a forum for building common ground, though understanding the needs of different contexts and societies, and addressing and resolving tensions.
There are limits to what can be standardised, particularly on a global level. For risk management, for example, we can standardise the way that we describe different risks. What we cannot do is standardise what level or types of risk are acceptable or unacceptable at a global level – these are inherently political, contextual decisions. The task for standardisation is to address issues in a way that can provide uniform, practical guidance, while leaving the space for different jurisdictions to make these decisions.
