March 28th: Meeting in the Norwegian Standards Institute (Standard Norge).

Purpose: To decide the final vote for Norway on whether the document format OOXML should become an international standard.

The meeting: 27 people in the room, 4 of which were administrative staff from Standard Norge.

The outcome: Of the 24 members attending, 19 disapproved, 5 approved.

The result: The administrative staff decided that Norway wants to approve OOXML as an ISO standard.

Their justification: “Standard Norge puts emphasis on that if this [OOXML] becomes an ISO/IEC standard, it will be improved to better accommodate the users’ needs.”

This translates to: “Yes, we know the standard is broken, 79% of our technical committee have told us. But we hope that it someday will be repaired by someone. And we’ll be happy to help if someone can give us the resources.”

Alright, the Norwegian Standards Institute is moving away from adopting quality standards to promoting a repair shop philosophy.

Why?

Since the meeting in August where Norway was to determine its initial vote, the Deputy CÈO of Standard Norge has repeatedly been selling us, I mean telling us: “We like standards, we want to approve standards”. It’s been as though he was preparing us for this shock ever since we first convened.

But how can a standards organisation that promotes ISO 9000 and ISO 20000 (ITIL) approve such a broken standard? Do they not believe in Total Quality Management themselves? Are they not practicing what they preach? Oh no, that’s right they don’t even have a standard for how to approve standards.

And maybe, just maybe there is a motivation behind all this. If they approve a broken standard, they set up a repair shop. There is good money in repairing stuff. Especially an 8000 page standard in dire need of fixing.

With a sigh of disappointment, I see the once proud ship called Standard Norge taking in water because administrative staff started drilling for gold.