ISO (International Organization for Standardization) is a worldwide federation of national standards bodies.

ISO as an organization

More specifically, it’s a nonprofit organization that develops and publishes standards of virtually every possible sort, ranging from standards for information technology to fluid dynamics and nuclear energy. Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, ISO is composed of 162 members, each one the sole representative for their home country.

As the largest developer and publisher of standards in the world, ISO fills the vital role of a medium for agreement between individual standards developers, spreading progress made by one country’s local developers across the world to further the goal of standardization.

How are ISO standards developed?

The International Organization for Standardization has a six-stage process for developing standards. The stages include the following:

• Proposal stage. The first step in developing a new standard starts when industry associations or consumer groups make a request. The relevant ISO committee determines whether a new standard is indeed required.
• Preparatory stage. A working group is set up to prepare a working draft of the new standard. The working group is composed of subject matter experts and industry stakeholders; when the draft is deemed satisfactory, the working group’s parent committee decides which stage occurs next.
• Committee stage. This is an optional stage during which members of the parent committee review and comment on the draft standard. When the committee reaches consensus on the technical content of the draft, it can move to the next stage.
• Enquiry stage. The draft standard at this stage is called a Draft International Standard (DIS). It is distributed to ISO members for comments and, ultimately, a vote. If the DIS is approved at this stage without any technical changes, ISO publishes it as a standard. If not, it moves to the approval stage.
• Approval stage. The draft standard is submitted as a Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) to ISO members. They vote to approve the new standard.
• Publication stage. If ISO members approve the new standard, the FDIS is published as an official international standard.

ISO participating members vote on standards approvals. A standard must receive affirmative votes from at least two-thirds of participating members and negative votes from no more than one fourth of participating members.

What are the different ISO standards?

There are currently 24106 different ISO standards. Some are very specific, such as ISO 10002 which deals with customer complaints, while others are more general and serve as a framework to manage a variety of processes throughout the business. For example, ISO 9001 which is the standard for a quality management system. Some of the most popular standards include:

• ISO 9001: the standard for a quality management system
• ISO 27001: a system for managing information security
• ISO 13485: the quality standard for medical devices

Fuente: Techtarget

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