Standards Development for Smart Systems: A Potential Way Forward

In this article, design and development of smart systems require cooperation of different technical disciplines. This multidisciplinarity represents a challenge for today's ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) standardization environment. This environment has evolved over the years and today comprises a huge variety of hundreds of Standards Setting Organisations, partly interconnected by a complex network of very diverse types of links and cooperation agreements. Yet, despite this complexity, ICT standardization is still very much monodisciplinary. Moreover, smart systems’ future true ubiquity and the resulting massive societal ramifications imply that societal stakeholders also need to participate in their standardization, thus further complicating the process. Integrating the necessary background information about the current standardization environment with two empirical studies the article sheds some light on the need for, as well as the benefits and issues to be associated with, multidisciplinarity in ICT standards setting. To resolve these issues, the article proposes the deployment of BOMOS, a collection of guidelines that establish a layered set of activities necessary for the management of a standardization process. While this solution may further increase the complexity of the standardization environment, it offers much greater flexibility and caters much better for the multidisciplinary, cross-domain standardization than the current system does.