number 4 - Standards

Taken for granted is standards both physical, process and regulatory. However without an approach that sets out the appropriate physical and process requirements the cost of business is higher, and the barriers to trade even more daunting.

An example from the 19th century is of the individual area times where one town could be 10 or 20 minutes different to a neighbour. With the onset of trains timetabling this became a nightmare and provided another impetus for standardising clocks around Greenwich Mean time. As technology progresses the opportunities and needs meant that time accuracy became more important leading to the setting of the second based on an atomic clock based n the vibrations of a caesium atom from work done at the National Physical laboratory in Teddington. Ever more accurate time keeping is at the heart of current satellite global positioning and mobile networks.

Other standards in various manufacturing and service industry e.g. through the British Standards Institute not only provide a stable and clear setting for business but a route for global standards and a setting for new developments.

An example in technology settings for wireless led by the group forming Cambridge Silicon Radio provided them with the vast majority of the market in the provision of Bluetooth capability to hardware users.

Looking at the organisations creating, maintaining and developing standards in the UK from those mentioned above and others, including the Intellectual Property office, Health & Safety Weights and Measures and the Laboratory of the Government Chemist, we see UK organisations providing world renowned expertise that allow UK based companies to be part of the standards process providing a kitemark of capability that helps trade for British companies and overseas companies locating in the UK.

A welcome initiative recently has been the efforts by the various standards bodies to present their services together as a UK offering offering rather than sub-optimal individual marketing. Another place where partnering together raises the profile and reach of UK PLC.

Finally it is worth mentioning the philosophy of organisations which is worth a much larger piece, maybe later. Every one of these major organisations develops and grows, or decays, dependent on leadership of both the political, management and imagination. An institute in this standards space clearly going places is one holding copies of all patents, and a repository of collected written wisdom, the British Library. Their recent approaches reaching out to a much wider audience and playing a strong part in business development as well as a culture deserves to be better publicised. If the current head of the Library moves on to a commercial company I'll buy shares!