Wednesday 26 March 2014

Good EU Conference on EU Rolling Plan for ICT Standardisation

I was speaking at the conference on the EU Rolling Plan on ICT Standardisation yesterday. The conference was organised by the European Commission - all information is available on the Commission website on the conference.

The conference was extremely good, in my opinion. It aimed at presenting the Rolling Plan, which is a planning document for ICT standardisation in support of EU policy priorities, and promoting it as a tool for driving the implementation of technologies. It was opened by Director Didier Herbert, DG ENTR, with a very inspiring speech and chaired by Michel Catinat, Head of Unit E4 dealing with innovation and ICT stanardisation in DG ENTR.

The conference was well attended with a number of key experts both from the European Standards Organisations and from global ICT standards bodies. I had the pleasure to co-facilitate a panel with seven standards bodies present. The topic was "Global Standards supporting EU Policy Priorities". I thought this was an excellent exchange between standards bodies on the usefulness of the Rolling Plan for their work. One major take away from this panel might be that while the effect of the Rolling Plan will be small in organisations that have a clear bottom up approach, yet for the conversation on a managerial level and for positioning global standards bodies as viable platforms to support required standards work the Rolling Plan is extremely useful.

The Commission will soon publish a report of the conference. So watch the space. I also uploaded the slides I was showing in my speech in the morning to slide share.



Final words: Many thanks to the Commission for organising this conference. Very useful and informative.