We’ve brought to believe that standardization is a great achievement, and certainly it is, especially in more and more global markets where many, many factors of difference determine their effectiveness.
But let’s look more closely at standardization’s facts, rather than at standards.
DAILY EXAMPLES
I’m thinking of the following practically daily examples:
Computer and mobile phones keyboards and touch screens: you are used to one, you go to another and you’re lost, or take much time to understand how it works.
Car dashboard switches: no two car models, even of the same car maker, have the same switches in the same positions. And this can be very dangerous when you hire a car, you jump off the plane, you’re hurrying, you’re given the auto papers and car’s key but nobody – nobody – tells you where the switches that you need are. In Catania (Italy) airport, the hiring company clerk – mind you – took almost half a hour to find how to position the car gear in reverse.
Print paper size: USA people joke on EU A4 “funny” size, while USA “standard” paper sheet size is for EU a problem.
Electricity sockets: each and every EU Country has its own, USA, too. When you travel around the world, you have to purchase a fortune of adaptors.
Garments and shoes sizes; yards versus meters, pounds versus kilograms, Fahrenheit versus Celsius, and so on. Many sit at Pythagoras’s table. is this true globalization? If I were an extra-terrestrial and I would understand some of the English language, I would expect UNO to mean something close to unification.
Drive left, drive right: An acquaintance of mine – a marine biologist – has to relocate himself in UK, south of London to make his living. In spite of the length of Italy’s sea coasts, he has a brand new car but he can’t take it with him in UK, because they, or we, drive the wrong side of the road. Yet, it is known that Sweden, after proper planning and works, changed from left to right in one night.
STANDARDIZATION RISKS
Is this true standardization? It seems that many a business profit of non-standardization, instead.
And most of us are seldom aware of the risks both of standardization and of non-standardization: what’s depicted above are just a very, very few examples, taken from everyday life.
A National Geographic’s documentary on the Airbus 380 first prototype tells very clearly of an almost one year delay in delivery – and consequent loss of customers, which favored Boeing’s Dreamliner – because of different computer software used by the German and French suppliers to design the avionics. This seems quite a naïve cause and effect analysis: anyone would immediately ask “why didn’t they agree which software to use, in the first place?”
A more sophisticated, if not malicious, analyst would imply some covered connection.
That’s what I mean. When working in steam coal sampling and analysis, years ago, there were two rival standards, ASTM and ISO. Sellers, buyers, third party inspectors proposed or imposed the ‘standard’ that most matched the characteristics of the cargo they were handling.
I wish my message to be clear. Standardization doesn’t solve all problems. On the contrary, it can be a problem itself, and therefore represent a formidable risk, to face with.
Because standardization is often represented by officials, who think that their desk is the ‘field’, while the real field is outside the ivory towers.