Reducing Industry Complexity with International Standards: Current Efforts for Services, E-commerce, Artificial Intelligence

The global business environment has grown increasing complex due to economic, cultural, demographic, legal, trade, and political (to name a few) changes, differences, and disparity among nations and geographical regions. This complexity is exacerbated by rapid advances in technology which could be employed appropriately as accelerators or inappropriately as barriers to beneficial change to society. One of the ways industries seek to reduce complexity is through the development and use of standards that cover many areas of manufacturing, hardware, software, telecommunication, consumer products, business processes, construction, etc. In the last few decades, the advent of service innovation, e-commerce, and now digital platforms powered by AI have all given rise to international standardization efforts. In this paper we discuss some of these standardization efforts that are service-related and representative which are of interest to the Service Science community with the aim of informing and encouraging stakeholders to participate, contribute, and produce synergy among academic and industry partners.