Most people are not aware about the staggering amount of standardisations that is scoping their lives. Most probably you are reading this post on some sort of electronic device that is glued together with standards and is communicating with the interconnected world on the sole virtue of standards alone. But even if you would print it the paper sheet will be sized to an ISO standard.
If you look around you will start seeing standards everywhere (and I mean EVERYWHERE): from the colour coding of the paint on the wall to your shoe size. Standards allow for the collaboration of people, companies, systems, and devices where they obey to the same principles without the need to calibrate on an individual basis again and again.
Where technology takes centre stage in the developments we witness today standardisation is the foundation for the interconnected world we live in. Technological evolution and standardization go hand in hand, they are really two sides of the same coin. I would dare to say that in a practical sense “technology = standardisation”.
Standardisation is a way to collaborate efficiently and effectively both when used explicitly between collaborators but even more when used implicitly as to allow creating efficient connections even between “nodes” in our interconnected world that do not even realise they are collaborating with others: and we all do!
While standards are scoping our lives profoundly, in general the process of standardisations is hardly seen as a political issue. But standards are scoping our society in how we live, how we collaborate and hence how and where we create our wealth and to who’s benefit.
In our economic models we do not measure the benefits of standards as well. How could we for instance measure the value of the metric system? To collaborate it makes life much easier if all use the same and constant measurement standard like the meter, litre, gram etc. And these are just the most obvious (but hard fought) standards governing our daily lives.
We have become very proficient in setting and using standards of all kinds. It almost seems to be part of our DNA to adopt standards and adapt to them. We witness a long-time and in fact autonomous trend: like technology, standards are created on top of others and we see accelerating returns as a consequence. The impact of standardisation can not be overestimated.