Noticed or un-noticed, standards are a part of our lives. If you standardize everything, you dampen innovation. If you standardize nothing, the result is non-interoperable clusters that are not easily integrated. Redundancy and destructive competition results in a lower-quality “deliverable”.
The difficulty the education education industry the United States has had in controlling its costs through consensus standardization processes lies in its ambivalence about whether it is a “culture” or a “business”. It is a little of each. We believe that a great deal of the cost structure of the US education industry could be managed by participating in ANSI standards processes and conforming to the leading practice discovery that results. Headwinds for fully realizing this possibility come from both the cultural and business side.
