Standards have always been a critical part of the telecom industry’s progress, but in the last few years, that process has changed, according to the woman who leads North America’s leading telecom standards leadership organization. Susan Miller, president and CEO of ATIS, sees a stronger focus on business priorities for standards, as well as a move away from rapid proliferation of diverse standards groups.

At NXTcomm, Miller will be chairing what has become an annual panel of service provider experts as part the ATIS TechThink program. This year, the Tuesday morning panel features Chris Rice, executive vice president for shared services, AT&T, Mark Wegleitner, senior vice president, technology, Verizon and Pieter Poll, CTO, Qwest.

“NXTComm is my learning time, it is very important from my perspective to get to talk to our member companies and to others who can give me a pulse on the industry,” Miller said.

The biggest challenge for ATIS remains being able to coordinate and collaborate with a diverse group of standards bodies globally, she said.

“Everyone looks at the business of standards from a global perspective,” Miller said. “No one wants to re-invent the wheel, and that places a specific and important emphasis on our ability to coordinate and collaborate with other standards groups. Everyone is serving a global constituency. Different groups have specific regional requirements and have the need to focus regionally, but do that against the backdrop of global standards.”

But the other major challenge, which remains, is delivering standards around the telecom service providers’ business priorities, and doing so at a faster pace than ever before.

“Our board of directors is unique in comparison to other standards organizations in that it is populated by very senior business executives,” Miller said. “Every day, they face complexity of the market, so the standards they pursue have to have significance. First and foremost, we have to deliver standards around their business priorities. So we look at priorities where business and technology intersect.”

The basic process has changed as the telecom industry has become more competitive, Miller added.

“It used to be standards for standards sake – companies would send their best and brightest into the room and ideas would bubble up from the bottom,” Miller said. “That process had some value, but the intersection of business needs with technical expertise you get in standards group does a lot to frame and focus the process.

“One of the things we have done is to move into very hard-driving project management around standards development,” Miller said. “From the time we studied IPTV to time we launched the [IPTV Interoperability Forum] was three months. One year out, they have an architecture. They have real objectives, driven by executives, and we report to executives whether we are meeting those objectives That is new, that is the formula that makes us unique, brings us success.”

The intensity of competition on all fronts is creating the greater sense of urgency, which is pushing the standards process forward more quickly, Miller said. “You have this backdrop of speed, of needing to do things very quickly, but you also have this complexity,” she said. “One of the advantages ATIS has is that we have a diverse membership – hardware vendors, software companies, IT companies, the service providers themselves, are all at the table.”

While the number of forums, associations and other groups with a hand in standards at one time seemed to be growing rapidly, Miller sees that proliferation slowing in most areas.

“ATIS has done a very good job at redirecting what was, three or four years ago, real explosive growth and proliferation of standards groups,” she said. I think that has slowed down. Plus, you have to distinguish between those that have roots in promotion, marketing, adoption and deployment as opposed to standards. You have to get down to core organizations that drive standards around business priorities and not to promote a specific technology.”

The DSL Forum, for example, started out promoting DSL deployment but has since tackled much broader issues, Miller said.

IPTV is an area in which ATIS is increasingly involved with its IPTV Interoperability Forum and here, Miller believes the organization is also gathering the appropriate parties at the standards table to facilitate those discussions, even though it is a different group.

“All the major players are at the table – but there are a few we are still going after,” Miller said. “We are in active discussions with them.”

In some cases, the companies ATIS is pursuing aren’t used to being part of the standards process. “We can’t step over the line – we know what we have found – they come historically from a place of needing to negotiate relationships individually, which can be very cumbersome,” Miller said. “On the network side of delivering service, we don’t speak the same language. We are in dialog with some of them – it is a huge cultural shift for them to come to the table. For example, Apple is highly successful but fairly closed system. To get them to think in terms of standards, you need to break down the corporate history, which requires significant cultural change.”