Vendor Escalation, Process Politicalization, and What Needs to Happen Next
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Once upon a time, most standards were set in a largely collegial atmosphere by career professionals who met in face to face meetings over a period of years. As a result, they got to know each other as individuals, and established individual relationships that helped the process move forward and allowed for productive give and take. Those were the days...
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While this process was not without its back scratching and game playing, at least the impact on interests other than those involved tended to be limited. After all, if performance standards for light bulbs had settled out at 45, 65 and 95 watts instead of 40, 60 and 90, no end user’s ox would have been gored at the level of the desk lamp.
Those that defined the rules for organizations such as ISO, IEC and ANSI (the American National standards Institute) tended not to favor simple majority voting to determine outcomes. Instead, they put a high value on consensus, in order to lessen the chance that minority interests would be oppressed. Other rules required that compliant processes include a process of appeal, so that even consensus could not be abused.
This is now: What we have just witnessed with the OOXML adoption process is the catastrophic failure of a system built for one purpose that has been subjected to forces that it was not designed to withstand. Those forces included intense pressure from vendors, including political pressure. The tactics utilized appear to have included taking advantage of rules crafted to foster openness, placing or outmaneuvering committee chairs, and recruiting employers to pressure committee members to vote their employers’ interests rather than their own technical judgment.
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