Increasing disaster Resilience by establishing a sustainable process to support Standardisation of technologies and services

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ResiStand (Increasing disaster Resilience by establishing a sustainable process to support Standardisation of technologies and services)

Période du rapport: 2017-05-01 au 2018-04-30

As the complexity of the world increases, our society is facing a growing number of crises and disasters threatening our citizens’ safety and security. These crises will increasingly have cross-border, even global consequences, which creates a need and willingness for joint crisis management actions.
With increasing collaboration between actors from various countries, the issues concerning technical, procedural, operational and semantic interoperability grow rapidly. Various technologies, management systems and services as well as the numerous interfaces should be harmonised to avoid communication cuts, incongruity of methods and incompatibility of systems.
Standardisation could be an efficient way to overcome these problems and thus significantly improve disaster resilience. However, standardisation is facing problems relating to its processes and to the identification of standardisation needs and opportunities. The aim of ResiStand was to identify and analyse these problems, propose new ways to overcome them, and thus increase the usefulness of standards in disaster resilience.
The goal of ResiStand was to find new ways to improve the crisis management and disaster resilience capabilities of the European Union and of the Member States with means of standards. This objective was addressed through proposing new standardisation activities, providing a better understanding of the potential of standardisation as a tool, and presenting a new, sustainable process for better and faster capitalizing on the potential of standardisation.

ResiStand approached the standardisation process through describing it as three consecutive phases: Pre-normative actions, Pre-standardisation and Standardisation. The various pre-normative activities by policy makers, end-users, industry and the research domain produce a multitude of ideas that could be used as a basis for new standardisation activities. However, only a fraction of these ideas ever find their way to the standardisation funnel and are included in the work programmes of the Technical Committees. The Pre-standardisation phase creates a bridge closing the gap between pre-standardisation and the actual standardisation work.
Another approach of ResiStand was the concept of stakeholder communities; each of them having their own role, motivation and effect in the process. The End-User Community (E-UC) consists of organisations that use standards in their operations, such as civil protection, rescue and law enforcement authorities and agencies as well as non-governmental organisations. The Supplier Community (SUC) consists of industrial and research organisations; the industry supplies the End-Users with systems, products and services while the research domain supply the industry and the End-Users with the research results. The Standards Community (SAG) develops the new work items suggested by the End Users or by the Suppliers towards standardisation deliverables.
At the end of the project, a total of 193 experts were registered as community members. They have been approached through web surveys, personal interviews and workshops to collect data related to standards as well as to the standardisation process. One result of this was the identification of 395 existing or planned standards related to the project’s topic; these are stored in the Catalogue of Standards in the ResiStand Web Catalogues, including descriptions of the standards.
Data about the standardisation needs of end users and the opportunities created by the suppliers were collected. Additionally, a set of crisis management related H2020 and FP7 projects were studied to identify further needs and opportunities. As a result of the above, ResiStand managed to collect altogether 210 needs and 314 opportunities.
Based on the collected data, ResiStand mapped the demand and the supply with the existing standards to identify standardisation gaps, and further produced a prioritised roadmap with a total of 69 potential new standardisation items to improve disaster management. These are stored in the Dynamic Roadmap, which is a part of the ResiStand Web Catalogues.
The ResiStand Assessment Framework (RAF) was developed for the evaluation of new standardisation ideas. The RAF enables its users to systematically map the potential benefits of a proposed standard. It collects input data about the idea, including basic information, potential impact to various stakeholder groups, Ethical–Societal–Legal issues, and feasibility of the standard. When all input forms have been filled in, the tool delivers an assessment that takes all above-mentioned aspects into account.
ResiStand also provided a critical evaluation of the potential of standards for improving disaster resilience. This included questions about the motivating factors to participate in standardisation, and about the constraints preventing the experts from participating in these activities. The policies of various EC agencies and the EU Legal Framework were also studied to create understanding of the role of standardisation in the Union’s policies.
Another result of ResiStand is the Pre-standardisation Process with purpose of guiding the initiators of potential new standardisation ideas through a structured self-evaluation process, which supports them in developing and structuring the idea, collecting all necessary information, and involving additional supporting organisations.
Additionally, ResiStand developed a Stakeholder Management Concept, which aims to increasing the representation of all relevant stakeholders in standardisation activities. The project was concluded with by the development of an implementation plan and recommendations for ensuring the future sustainability of the ResiStand Pre-standardisation Process and the Stakeholder Management Concept.

The results of ResiStand provide a bridge between the pre-normative phase and the actual standardisation process that is managed by the standards organisations through closing the gap through the introduction of the Pre-standardisation Process and the Stakeholder Management Concept.
The Pre-standardisation process will bring the standardisation process to a new level: it will significantly speed up the process of introducing new work items and publishing new standardisation deliverables, which also leads to cost savings. The Pre-standardisation process offers a way to assess the feasibility and impact of proposed standards in advance, which prevents costly investments in non-optimal standards. The involvement of all stakeholder groups in the pre-standardisation process leads towards standards that will better serve the whole society. The process also prevents duplicate work between European and international standardisation.
The 69 proposed new working items identified and assessed by the ResiStand project offer a good basis for the future standardisation efforts. The consortium has also identified for each initiative the most suitable Technical Committees for the development of the standards.
Finally, there is huge hidden potential in the ResiStand that can significantly extent the impact of the project: Even though all that has been said above applies to standardisation related to crisis management and disaster resilience, the methods and tools offered by ResiStand – such as the assessment framework, the roadmapping and the sustainable process – can with minor adjustments be applied to practically any domain of standardisation.

Disaster Management Standardisation Roadmap

Objectives of ResiStand

ResiStand Pre-Standardisation Process

ResiStand Stakeholder Communities

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ResiStand (Increasing disaster Resilience by establishing a sustainable process to support Standardisation of technologies and services)

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