In furtherance of the Statement of Direction that IBM will work with appropriate standards groups to develop appropriate standards, the company reckons that it now has 1,200 employees serving on what sounds a rather excessive 1,100 different standards committees – and is impatient to see them reach agreed conclusions sooner – it used to take five to seven years from agreement that something must be done to a standard emerging, and IBM estimates that that has come down to three or four years – but it wants it to move still faster.
