Top CTOs to develop ICT standards action plan

ITU Telecom World 2009 opened in Geneva on Monday

A group of chief technology officers will meet at the ITU Telecom World conference in Switzerland this week to discuss how to cope with the proliferation of ICT standards.

Twenty of the world's most senior IT executives will aim to pinpoint which standards the ICT industry needs, and where they should be formed, explained Malcolm Johnson, director of the International Telecommunication Union's (ITU's) Standardisation body.

Johnson claimed that the ITU's status as the world's only global standardisation body makes it best placed to develop such standards.

"There are hundreds of bodies creating ICT standards, and every week there is a new forum or consortium established," he said.

"This makes it difficult for the industry to know where to go to develop standards, and leads to problems for businesses and consumers as there are so many competing standards."

Johnson's remit at the ITU is to develop standards to ensure interoperability between telecoms networks, as well as those that relate to areas such as online video, teleconferencing, Blu-ray disks and mobile handsets.

However, a relatively new area is the lack of an agreed common methodology for calculating the impact of the ICT industry on global emissions. Johnson said that this deficiency had diminished credibility in the argument that ICT can play a vital role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

ITU members come from the public and private sectors, and the organisation includes 191 member states and more than 700 private sector bodies.

Johnson claimed that very few of the bodies had been apprehensive about the creation of a new methodology.

"The only concerns were whether the method we adopt will favour one type of company over another," he said. "I was actually surprised that there was no opposition to the ITU taking a bigger role to reduce climate change."

Johnson explained that this agenda had been spurred by a visit from United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon in 2007.

At the opening ceremony marking the start of the ITU Telecom World event on Monday, Ki-moon spoke of the importance of ICT in tackling core global issues such as climate change, and called for participants to use ICT creatively to usher in a new "green economy" and to drive progress in improving the lives of those most in need.