Approval Specialists Forum and Blog

On June 30 the CEO of Standards Australia, John Tucker, sent out an email talking about the global financial crisis blah blah, and how bad things were.   Well they seem particularly bad at Standards Australia to the point where they are having trouble adhering to their raison d’etre.  The progress of standards making has ground to a snails pace and the safety standard for IT and Telecomms equipment, AS/NZS60950 is a prime example.  More about 60950 later.

The lack of income for Standards Australia and therefore long term viability for Standards making in this country shouldn’t be any surprise.  SA used to receive income from selling the standards that volunteers put together (hard not to make money right ??), then back in 2003 they carved off the money making side into a company called SAI Global.   

Standards Australia were given a “corpus of funds”, aka a wad of cash, the idea being to invest it wisely and make standards from the interest received on their investments.  SA also entered into an agreement they would later regret, that made SAI Global the exclusive publisher of Australian Standards.

Evidence of regret….

http://www.standards.org.au/downloads/090623_Final_Arbitrator_clarifies_effect_of_publishing_agreement.pdf”>

Cue the global financial crisis and while I have no idea where SA put their money, it obviously wasn’t in BHP or Rio Tinto shares, as they appear to have lost a truckload of cash.  So much so that they’ve made project managers redundant and put the brakes on the progress of many standards, including the long awaited revision of AS/NZS60950 (based on IEC60950).

IEC60950 2nd edition was published in 2005 and here we are mid 2009, 4 years and counting,  awaiting the AU/NZ version.  According to Adrian O’Connell *, the General Manager Operations of Standards Australia, Project 6053 Amdt 2 to AS/NZS 60950:2000 Safety of information technology equipment “…will be placed on hold pending the availability of resources or a change in development pathways. While Standards Australia will do its best to complete this project/s prior to the closure of the Standards Australia funded pathway on 30 June 2010, it is possible that resources may not become available for us to do so. Any current project not completed by 30 June 2010 will only proceed on a funded basis.”

This has interesting implications for the ACMA, the electrical regulators and other bodies that reference AS/NZS60950 as evidence of compliance.  IEC60950 2nd edition 2005 is being tested to by hundreds of product manufacturers and for the forseeable future they will need to produce 2 totally different versions of the standard, the 1st edition covering AU/NZ requirements and the 2nd edition to satisfy EU. 

Interested to receive comments from any observers out there as to how this will play out and what future, if any, lies in store…will Standards Australia be making Standards in Australia ?

Martin.