Standards and the Smart Grid
If you haven't heard the words "smart grid" before, that's likely to change soon. That's especially so if you live in the U.S., where billions of dollars in incentive spending is pouring into making the smart grid a reality. As you might expect, since I'm talking about it here, the smart grid will rely on standards to become real. A whole lot of standards, in fact, and that's a problem
Those of you who are subscribers to my free standards eJournal Standards Today know that I've dedicated each of the last several issues to one of the many multi-billion dollar initiatives that the Obama Administration has launched that are heavily dependent on standards - which in many cases do not yet exist. Each initiative is also of great complexity, and will need to rely on a level of cooperation and collaboration that does not natively exist in the marketplace. That's certainly the case with the Smart Grid challenge, and that's what the latest issue of Standards Today is all about.
The final challenge results from the fact that in the U.S, standards are driven by industry, and not government. That's fine when the standards-related goal is narrow (e.g., enabling mobile devices to communicate with wireless hubs) but not so adequate when the standards you need will need to come from 20 or 30 standards organizations, and all of those standards must play nicely together.
That's the case, for example, when you'd like to convert an entire health and insurance ecosystem to adopt a suite of scores of standards to describe electronic health records in just a few years' time. Today, the infrastructure simply doesn't exist in private industry to pull it off, and in the U.S., at least, the government is on the short end of the learning when it comes to inspiring this level of collaboration (in contrast, Europe has been working on challenges like this for decades).
Go there....
Don
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