Discover ISO
How ISO standards are developed
The national delegations of experts of a technical committee meet to discuss, debate and argue until they reach consensus on a draft agreement. This is circulated as a Draft International Standard (DIS) to ISO's membership as a whole for comment and balloting.
Many members have public review procedures for making draft standards known and available to interested parties and to the general public. The ISO members then take account of any feedback they receive in formulating their position on the draft standard.
If the voting is in favour, the document, with eventual modifications, is circulated to the ISO members as a Final Draft International Standard (FDIS). If that vote is positive, the document is then published as an International Standard.
Every working day of the year, an average of eight ISO meetings are taking place somewhere in the world. In between meetings, the experts continue the standards' development work by correspondence. Increasingly, their contacts are made by electronic means and some ISO technical bodies have already gone over entirely to working electronically, which speeds up the development of standards and cuts travel costs.
- See Stages of the development of an International Standard for more detail of the development process.
Discover ISO
- ISO's name
- Why standards matter
- What standards do
- Who standards benefit
- The ISO brand
- How to recognize an ISO standard
- The scope of ISO's work
- Examples of the benefits standards provide
- What's different about ISO 9001 and ISO 14001
- Why conformity assessment is important
- What "international standardization" means
- ISO's origins
- Who can join ISO
- How the ISO system is managed
- How the ISO system is financed
- How ISO decides to develop a standard
- Who develops ISO standards
- How ISO standards are developed
- ISO's international partners
- ISO's regional partners
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