White House Pushes Forward on Standardization Strategy

The U.S. government and industry groups are increasing their focus on pre-standardization activities that aim to enhance standards robustness across the private sector.

The White House’s National Standards Strategy for Critical and Emerging Technology emphasizes the role of R&D in pre-standardization, with increasing R&D funding identified as the first line of effort in the implementation roadmap.

At the NIST Standards Forum earlier this month, Susan Miller, president of the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions, described pre-standardization as a fairly new topic that includes producing standardization seed documents and identifying research gaps that preclude standards development.

“It’s become sort of the new and norm, like, ‘Wow, there’s a magic that happens before standardization,’” Miller said.

Standards set the bar for a technology’s performance as well as the methods used to assess that performance, NIST senior adviser for standards policy Jayne Morrow said in an interview. For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many research programs developed novel ways to detect viral particles in water or air. Further research was then required to develop a standard that could verify the performance of those technologies and be applied internationally.

“It’s the research that underpins what’s needed to write the standard,” Morrow said. “If it’s too early, you’re trying to standardize before you really know what you can achieve.”

The R&D goals in the roadmap include sustaining funding for critical and emerging technologies and associated pre-standardization R&D, prioritizing pre-standardization R&D in budget requests, and incentivizing federal R&D grantees to participate in standards development. The National Science Foundation has already begun considering standardization activity as part of grantees’ broader impact statements, Morrow said, encouraging continued engagement beyond journal publication to contribute to exploring potential standards and joining with other researchers to come to a consensus.

A key part of the White House’s strategy will see movement soon with the announcement of the selected partner for the Standardization Center of Excellence. The center will contribute to pre-standardization, making information about relevant activities more accessible and openly shared, Morrow said.

The federal government has taken on a support role for the private sector-led system in the U.S., Morrow said. In that vein, the center will act as a resource hub for the decentralized system, with information and data sharing, workforce capacity building, and convening opportunities for industry groups to give input early in the standards development process. “If you’re a technology developer, you don’t always know about all these activities,” she added.

Andrew Kireta, president of the standards organization ASTM International, proposed at the forum the development of a research-to-standardization roadmap in conjunction with industry and academic research.

“Standardization comes afterwards, right? So let’s figure out where the technology is going,” he said.