IHS White Paper:  Developing a Company Standards Strategy

In this interconnected, collaborative business world no company can afford to be without a Company Standards Strategy. Standards connect a business to its customers and the market and underpin all of its activities. This paper provides a roadmap for standards strategy development and shows where the benefits are to be found.

Leading companies have found that standardization can no longer be left at operational level but must be considered as an integral part of their business strategy development. By using familiar business tools, such as strategic analysis, SWOT and Michael Porter's Value Chain, this paper shows how developing a standardization strategy, integrated with current business functions, can be a worthwhile and practical proposition.

Strategic standardization embraces several concepts:

• 'Strategic Standards Management' - the management of standards and regulations to support strategic decision making and company risk reduction
• 'Strategic Standardization Management™' - a term coined by ANSI to describe the process of investigating, defining and recommending appropriate strategies by which a company could gain competitive advantage or avoid competitive disadvantage
• Company Standards Management - the company function responsible for creating a return on investment from standardization information, influencing and implementation

Drawing on a fuller description of the process described in Best Practice… Next Practice - How to survive, innovate and grow in an ever changing world (BSI, 2005), the paper indicates how leading companies create the organisation's standardization response to the commercial, operational and stakeholder needs defined in its business strategy.

Alignment of the Company Standards Strategy with other company strategies, such as licensing, patent and alliances, ensures measurable support for the company's business processes, technologies and products and ultimately its core capabilities.

Most importantly, the paper indicates how using standards strategically can directly lead to improved performance, better company alignment and integration and a more certain future, resulting in superior and sustainable financial returns.