International standardisation - a pipe dream

Maybe Henry Ford had the right idea when he said of his cars, ‘You can have any colour you like as long as it is black! He would most certainly get a shock if he were to return to earth again and see the wide variety of ‘blacks’ now available. Perhaps his idea of standardisation represented the ideal situation for a manufacturing organisation in those days, indeed it may be the attitude of many manufacturers today. However, one must not lose sight of the fact that this kind of rigid standardisation for standardisation’s sake is just as dangerous as having no standardisation at all.

When we look at the field of International Standardisation, we must ask ourselves a number of basic and searching questions, and to see the problems arising from our attempts to answer them.