Interoperability Clearinghouse

For standards to be successful, they must be widely accepted and implemented. A standard that is perceived as useless, impossible, or worthless serves no useful purpose, even if it, in truth, has none of these negative characteristics. Thus, it is critical to obtain "buy-in" from key stakeholders, usually through collaborative authoring and review, such that these stakeholders commonly share a positive perception of a standard. This requires deft inter-organizational and inter-personal skills and an extremely open and technically excellent verifiable methodology.
When working with standards it is also critical to be adept at navigating the layered and complimentary nature of related standards. Thus, one who would propose new standards, or changes to existing standards, must carefully avoid the synchronization challenges that can result from redundancy across related standards and the confusion potential of conflicting or contradictory standards.

Standards go a long way toward interoperability, but as many who have tried to buy "CORBA" have learned, you can't just buy a standard off the shelf -- you can only buy products, which may implement (or partially implement) standards. Thus, to get the most out of standards, you really need a host of other implementation data as well - such as:

Common Criteria

Which standards relate to my context in a helpful way?
Which products implement those standards?
How complete/accurate are those products' implementations?

The ICH Methodology is structured to use standards effectively by combining standards expertise with real-world, 3rd-party implementation data to drive product selection and integration. The diagram below gives a fair picture of the other factors, in addition to standards, that are key to the ICH methodology.

Standards in the ICH Methodology universe

Understanding standards and their organization is key to identifying proper foundational and related standards. The first thing to understand is that standards can be organized in various ways. One useful standards taxonomy is based upon the various bodies and standards concerns. Some of these more prominent bodies include the following:

ANSI (American National Standards Institute)
COS (Corporation for Open Systems International)
DOD-STD (Department of Defense Standards)
MIL-HDBK (Military Handbooks)
MIL-SPEC (Military Specifications)
MIL-STD (Military Standard )
ECMA (European Computer Manufactures Association)
FED-STD (Federal Standards)FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards)
IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers)
ISO (International Organization for Standards)

ITU(CCITT)International Telecommunications Union
MISCELLANEOUS (TR, SR-RG, NMF,IHO,COSE Motif)
NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology)
OMG (Object Management Group)
OSF (Open Software Foundation)
RFC (Request for Comments)
STANAG (Standardization Agreement (NATO))
TIA/EIA (Telecommunications Industry/Electronic Industries Assoc.)
TSGCE (PG/6) Tri-Service Group on Comm.and Elec.

The more prominent standards utilized in software development are the IEEE, ISO and IEC.

The ICH leverages its membership base's vast intuitive experience and in-depth participation in other standards efforts and with other standards concerns to get the most out of standards. The ICH methodology maximizes the identification, support and use of applicable existing or emerging standards, and to minimize the potential for conflicting or contrary new guidance, whether in the form of proposed changes to existing standards, or new standards proposals.