{"id":16,"date":"2015-07-15T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-07-15T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/proftesting.com\/blog\/?p=16"},"modified":"2016-05-16T16:53:57","modified_gmt":"2016-05-16T16:53:57","slug":"2015713iso-ansi-iaf-standards-soup-making-sense-out-of-a-bunch-of-acronyms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.proftesting.com\/blog\/2015\/07\/15\/2015713iso-ansi-iaf-standards-soup-making-sense-out-of-a-bunch-of-acronyms\/","title":{"rendered":"ISO, ANSI, IAF \u2013 Standards Soup. Making Sense out of a Bunch of Acronyms"},"content":{"rendered":"

There has been a lot of buzz about ISO\/IEC 17024: 2012 \u2013 Conformity Assessment \u2013 General requirements for bodies operating certification of persons<\/em>.\u00a0 With so many acronyms associated with this standard (ISO, IEC, ANSI, IAF, etc.) it is easy to get confused about who owns this standard and who accredits against it. \u00a0\u00a0We will explore specifics of the standard itself in another post.\u00a0 The purpose of this post is to help explain the various bodies associated with ISO 17024.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with \u201cISO.\u201d\u00a0 ISO stands for the International Organization for Standardization.\u00a0 You may wonder why the acronym letters don\u2019t match the title. That\u2019s because \u201cInternational Organization for Standardization\u201d would have different acronyms in different languages \u2013 for example, it would be listed as IOS in English and OIN in French for Organisation internationale de normalisation<\/em>; therefore ISO\u2019s founders decided to give it the short form ISO. ISO is derived from the Greek word isos<\/em>, meaning equal. Whatever the country, whatever the language, the body is always referred to as ISO.<\/p>\n

ISO is a member of a world cooperative of three big standards organizations: ISO, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).\u00a0 ISO and IEC have an agreement to put both names on all standards which is why you see ISO\/IEC 17024 instead of just ISO 17024.<\/p>\n

ISO is an independent, non-governmental membership organization and the world’s largest developer of voluntary International Standards.\u00a0 ISO is comprised of 162 member countries who are the national standards bodies around the world. \u00a0The United States representative to ISO is the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) (see below). ISO has published more than 19,500 International Standards covering almost every industry, from technology and food safety to agriculture and healthcare.\u00a0 You might be familiar with ISO\u2019s biggest standards: the ISO 9000 series of standards associated with Quality Management.<\/p>\n

It is important to remember that ISO doesn\u2019t accredit anyone or certify anyone.\u00a0 ISO is simply a clearinghouse for standards and standards development.\u00a0 The standards themselves are developed by technical committees and working groups comprised of experts in a particular field of interest. ISO maintains a \u201cneutrality principle\u201d which means that the content of the standard may not state a preference for a form or one type of assessment over another. In other words, the standard may not require certification or accreditation.\u00a0 The idea is that anybody should be able to use a standard to improve the way they are doing business, even if they determine they are applying the standard correctly themselves.<\/p>\n

ISO has a special division called ISO CASCO.\u00a0 CASCO stands for \u201cConformity Assessment Committee.<\/em>\u201d\u00a0 Conformity assessment is the process used to show that a product, service or system meets specified requirements.\u00a0 \u00a0CASCO standards generally<\/em> start with the number \u201c17\u201d such as ISO\/IEC 17024.\u00a0 CASCO Standards are developed by working groups.\u00a0 National member bodies nominate individuals to serve on working groups. The graphic below depicts how an accreditation body, like the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), operating according to ISO\/IEC 17011, accredits a certification body, such as a certification body for persons against ISO\/IEC 17024, who then certifies a person.<\/p>\n

\"ISO\"<\/p>\n

ANSI is a membership organization formed in 1918 by voluntary standards bodies.\u00a0 ANSI is the official United States representative to ISO and participates in the International Accreditation Forum (IAF).\u00a0 ANSI\u2019s mission is to enhance the global competitiveness of U.S. business and the American quality of life by promoting and facilitating voluntary consensus standards and conformity assessment systems and ensuring their integrity.\u00a0 ANSI wears two hats: one hat is serving as the consolidator of standards that become American National Standards (ANS) and the other is serving as an accrediting body (AB).\u00a0 ANSI maintains a division between these two activities.\u00a0 As an AB, ANSI is the organization that accredits certification bodies for persons to ISO\/IEC 17024.<\/p>\n

IAF is a global association of Accreditation Bodies (ANSI, etc.), certification body associations, industry associations, and other stakeholder organizations and scheme owners involved in conformity assessment activities in a variety of fields including management systems, products, services and personnel.\u00a0 IAF members meet regularly to agree on how to accredit against conformity assessment (CASCO) standards (harmonization of assessment practices).\u00a0 They also create MLAs (multi-lateral agreements) and MRAs (mutual recognition agreements) to acknowledge the work of its peers and reduce duplication of effort in accreditation.\u00a0 IAF committees create guidance documents where required.\u00a0 Finally, IAF manages a peer review process for ABs. For Certification Bodies, what is most exciting is the potential for a MLA for personnel certification bodies. This MLA has many possibilities including permitting a CB accredited by ANSI against ISO\/IEC 17024 to be recognized by an AB in another country.<\/p>\n

Professional Testing is involved in all of these organizations.\u00a0 At ISO, our staff chaired Working Group 30, which revised ISO\/IEC 17024 and also developed a terminology document for personnel certification.\u00a0 Our staff is currently co-chairing Working Group 42, which is revising ISO\/IEC 17011, and we serve on various ISO CASCO policy committees.\u00a0 Highly involved in ANSI, Professional Testing staff serves on ANSI\u2019s Board of Directors and Workcred\u2019s Board of Directors; participates as an Assessor for ANSI for ISO\/IEC 17024; serves on the Conformity Assessment Policy Committee (CAPC), National Policy Committee (NPC), and the International Conformity Assessment Committee (ICAC); and previously served on the Personnel Certification Accreditation Committee (PCAC).\u00a0 Finally, at IAF, Professional Testing staff chairs the Certification of Persons working group and chairs the Assessor Competency Task Force.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There has been a lot of buzz about ISO\/IEC 17024: 2012 \u2013 Conformity Assessment \u2013 General requirements for bodies operating certification of persons<\/em>.  With so many acronyms associated with this standard (ISO, IEC, ANSI, IAF, etc.) it is easy to get confused about who owns this standard and who accredits against it.   We will explore specifics of the standard itself in another post.  The purpose of this post is to help explain the various bodies associated with ISO 17024.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":177,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-industry-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proftesting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proftesting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proftesting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proftesting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proftesting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.proftesting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":512,"href":"https:\/\/www.proftesting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions\/512"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proftesting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proftesting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proftesting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proftesting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}