For the past several years, stakeholders have shown interest in how the various standards and specification developing organizations within the electronic physical security industry relate to each other.

Recently, SIA Standards has attempted to address this issue by reaching out to other groups and discussing ways in which we can harmonize our efforts to deliver an outcome that is beneficial to the industry as a whole. Born from these discussions is the SIA Standards Committee's position paper on harmonization.

The paper describes an approach to harmonizing technical and operational standards among cooperating standards organizations, consortia and forums within the electronic physical security industry. SIA Standards will be returning to this subject in meetings throughout the year, and as always, looks forward to comments and stakeholder participation in standards activities.

The paper, authored by Steve Van Till, chairman of the SIA Standards Committee, is titled, “Harmonizing Standards within the Security Industry.” Van Till breaks the issue down into five principles: complementary standards, shared reference architecture, shared data element definitions, harmonized use cases and regulatory considerations. The paper offers definite measures that can be taken in order to unify standard and specification development efforts that is based on information sharing and coordination between groups to set non-overlapping goals.