A practitioner's guide to standards and the government

Reviewer: Judy Marian Myerson

The basic purpose of this paper is to give practitioners a better guide to standards in the government. The paper fulfills its purpose by discussing standards for open systems from the perspectives of two audiences: buyers and vendors. Unlike related material, this paper provides guidance on dealing with common problems with software standards. The paper is divided into two sections, covering open systems acquisitions from buyers' and vendors' perspectives. The first section introduces the reader to software standards in procurement documents on open systems. The benefits of procurement standards are listed. They include interchangeability among hardware platforms, easier comparisons, configuration flexibility, and interoperability of components. The problems of finding the standards to fit all the requirements of procurement can be difficult. Within the government, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and federal, state, and local procurement regulations are available. In private industry, however, there is no easy method of finding out what standards exists and how to apply them. This area still requires extensive knowledge of the technologies, the standardization activities, and the market in general. Normally, larger, technically focused user firms have the resources to lead the standardization effort from a user perspective, just as large vendors have the resources to lead from the provider side. CIOs and MIS departments lead in determining what is wanted with respect to technology and standardization. The second section discusses how vendors carry out a continuing balancing act of incorporating all standards relevant to a given product, while achieving the best performance/price ratio and time to market. To assist customers to move from proprietary systems to open systems, the NIST has developed a software profile, known as the Application Portability Profile (APP). This profile is based on an open system reference model associated with the IEEE POSIX.0 committee work. Complying with the profile requirements can be a frustrating task. Knowledge of the software standardization cycle is essential for successful migration to open systems. The best feature of the paper is the illustration on APP. The worst feature is the inconsistent breakdown of headers, which can be confusing to readers new to the field of standardization. The paper's length is suitable for the subject matter. The use of bold letters in the first column on the first page is a clever way to grab a reader's attention. The typography for the headers could be improved to distinguish the two main sections more easily, however. The paper needs a list of references to help the reader pursue discussions on standards. Overall, the paper opens a door to further discussion on developing the guides to government standards. It serves as a possible blueprint for standardizing the guides.