What’s in a Name? The Idiot’s Guide to Standards, Part 1

by Aaron F. Snyder, Grant Gilchrist, and Erich Gunther

This primer presents the standards continuum, which ranges from a single-user, proprietary specification on one end to a full international standard on the other. Understanding these distinctions is an essential first step to managing the coming flood of changes. Since vendors have millions of dollars at stake, they will sometimes use “creative naming” to give their own offerings more weight and credibility. It’s your job to separate the marketing fluff from the technical reality.

The Standards Continuum

As depicted in the illustration, the standards continuum stretches from proprietary specifications to de facto requirements to full international de jure standards.

• Proprietary specifications are protocols owned and set forth by one company (occasionally by a small group of companies)
• De facto requirements occur when proprietary standards gain enough market acceptance that customers expect them to be supported in future products
• De jure standards are those that have been codified by a standards organization.

Often misapplied, the term standard is truly only applicable in certain situations. At EnerNex, we advocate reserving the use of standard for de jure standards — especially when using “standard” by itself without any modifiers. There may appear to be little harm in referring to de facto standards simply as “standards,” but this actually dilutes and confuses the definition. If the specs are far enough along that they are in widespread use by many products, we suggest the use of requirements or de facto requirements instead. If they are in the hands of one or two vendors, we suggest specifications or proprietary specifications instead.

Specifications and Requirements

Specifications and requirements can be defined by individuals, organizations or alliances. Often proprietary, they are developed quickly, usually over a period of months.

Proprietary specifications often evolve into de facto requirements when they achieve enough commonality among enough producers. That’s often when the marketplace begins to refer to them as de facto standards, causing confusion with true, de jure standards.

An example drawn from the computing industry is the Microsoft set of application programming interfaces, or APIs. These publicly available interfaces are used by developers in combination with the Microsoft Windows SDK (software development kit) to create applications intended to run in the Windows operating system. Microsoft has mechanisms to incorporate feedback from developers and customers for their software, APIs, and SDK, and also hosts conferences to increase awareness and information exchange among the entire ecosystem. Finally, there is a certification program (the “designed for” sticker/logo) to inform customers of the relative capabilities of hardware and software conforming to this set of practices. Although frequently referred to a “standards,” they are actually requirements controlled by a single organization.

True Standards

True de jure standards are codified by a formal standards body in a manner similar to laws. In fact, true standards may be written into law in certain jurisdictions. China, for instance, often mandates certain standards to give its own, home-grown companies an advantage. To move beyond regional standards, there are pacts in place to allow joint standards between various European, Asian, American, and international organizations. This is the first step toward true harmonization, whereby a standard is in place for a broader market.

Once you understand the true nature of the standards continuum, you next need to know the key players. The next installment of this primer will explain the role of users’ groups, alliances and standards development organizations, and highlight the key players you should be monitoring over the months ahead.

Aaron F. Snyder, Ph.D., obtained his education from Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, and the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (INPG) in Grenoble, France. He is currently a Consulting Engineer for EnerNex Corporation in Knoxville, Tennessee, and actively participates in smart grid and advanced metering infrastructure organizations. He serves on numerous metering standards development committees at national (ANSI) and international (IEC, IEEE, OIML) levels. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.

Grant Gilchrist, P.E., is a Consulting Engineer and Systems Architect on the Smart Grid Engineering Team at EnerNex Corporation. He is a member of several utility data communications standards bodies including the IEC working groups for SCADA, substation automation, protocol security, and interoperability. He is a founding member of the Technical Committee for the Distributed Network Protocol (DNP3). Most recently he has been helping several major utilities develop technical requirements for their Advanced Metering Infrastructures, and is editing the IEC 62351-5 standard for security of the IEC 60870-5 and DNP3 protocols.

Erich W. Gunther, P.E., is the Chairman, Chief Technology Officer, and a co-founder of EnerNex Corporation in Knoxville Tennessee - an electric power research, engineering, and consulting firm. Erich is actively involved in many activities directly related to architecting, designing, and building the Smart Grid. He has been a member of the DOE sponsored GridWise Architecture Council since its inception in 2004 and is on the DOE Modern Grid Initiative project team. He has been a member of the EPRI IntelliGrid project team from its earliest days and played a significant role in developing the IntelliGrid Architecture and Use Case Development process. Erich serves on the board of directors of the Utility Communication Architecture International users group, and he is the chairman of the UtilityAMi and OpenHAN organizations.

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