How does ISO decide what standards to develop?
Working through the ISO community, it is the people who need the standards that decide. What happens is that the need for a standard is felt by an industry or business sector, which communicates the requirement to one of ISO’s national members. The latter then proposes the new work item to ISO as a whole. If accepted, the work item is assigned to an existing technical committee. Proposals may also be made to set up technical committees to cover new scopes of technological activity. In order to use resources most efficiently, ISO only launches the development of new standards for which there is clearly a market requirement.
