Open Comments, hosted by The Open Group
Welcome to Open Comments hosted by The Open Group, where we’ll discuss things openly with our guests from a variety of backgrounds and from different walks of life. Through this podcast, we hope to give you an inside look into a variety of topics with an equal mix of humor and candor.
In this series so far, we have touched on the following topics: Healthcare, HR, Diversity + Access to Technology, Cybersecurity, and lots more. We hope you enjoy our show and look forward to bringing more topics into the fold. Let’s get started!
Disclaimer: The Open Comments Podcast (hosted by The Open Group*) is presented purely for informational and educational purposes only. The views and opinions expressed by the hosts and the guests are their own and are not intended to harm or offend any group, organization, company, individual, anyone, or anything.
*The Open Group is a global, vendor- and technology-neutral consortium upon which organizations rely to lead the development of technology standards and certifications. With more than 900 member organizations around the globe, we have a diverse membership that spans all sectors of the technology community.
Hosts: Ash Patel (Marketing Specialist, The Open Group), Oliver David (Marketing Manager, The Open Group), and Irene Canizales (Events Planner, The Open Group).
Open Comments, hosted by The Open Group
Open Comments - Episode 26: Exploring World Standards Day with Steve Nunn
Can standards in technology be the unsung heroes of innovation? Join us as we celebrate World Standards Day with Steve Nunn, President and CEO of The Open Group, who shares his fascinating journey from a career in law to leading a global standards organization. Steve's insights reveal how his background in intellectual property law unexpectedly paved the way to a transformative role at X Open Company, laying the foundation for his leadership at The Open Group. His career path is a testament to the power of embracing unexpected opportunities and the joy of lifelong learning.
Standards might not be everyone's favorite topic, but their impact on technology is profound. Steve explains how standards ensure products from various manufacturers work together seamlessly, enhancing convenience and safety in industries like healthcare and enterprise architecture. The Open Group's contributions, notably the TOGAF standard, are essential in providing a unified language that promotes efficiency and saves lives. Learn how standards are the backbone of innovation, allowing new technologies to reach their full potential without borders or barriers.
In a world of rapid technological advancement, setting standards is no small feat, especially in fields like artificial intelligence. Discover how The Open Group's Open Professions program is crucial in defining professional practice standards across various sectors. From tackling the challenges of evolving technologies to fostering collaboration through events like the upcoming summit in Houston, we underscore the pivotal role of standards in solving complex business problems. Engage with us and The Open Group as we explore how these frameworks not only maintain order but propel industries into the future.
Copyright © The Open Group 2023-2025. All rights reserved.
Welcome back to Open Comments. In this episode, we will be discussing World Standards Day and the role of standards in technology. With us today is Steve Nunn, president and CEO of the Open Group. Steve joined the Open Group in 1993, spending 17 years as Chief Operating Officer and General Counsel before becoming CEO in 2015. He was also CEO of the AEA from 2010 until 2015. Steve is a lawyer by training, has an LLB, honours in law with French and retains a current legal practising certificate. Thank you, steve Nunn, for joining us for this episode on the role that standards has to play within the Oval Group as we celebrate World Standards Day on October 14th. To start with, let's begin with a few introductionary questions. So, steve, please can you tell us about your career journey so far?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Thank you, ash, and thank you, oliver for having me on the podcast today. I'm a regular listener. I've heard every one of them so far, so I finally get my chance to participate, thank you.
Speaker 2:My career journey well, I've heard some very interesting ones on your previous broadcasts. Mine is hopefully fairly short to describe. I did a law degree with French and that took me into the legal profession. I wanted to qualify as a solicitor, so this is in the UK at this point. So I did qualify as a solicitor and I worked for a medium-sized law firm in Reading, ironically where the Open Group has its UK office, not entirely coincidental, however, I'll explain why. But I worked in Reading and I decided to specialise, had the opportunity, I should say, to specialise in intellectual property law, which at the time was quite rare outside London as far as the UK was concerned, and a lot of that at the time was around technology and particularly the IT industry, and so being based in Reading gave the firm and myself the opportunity to have clients that were operating in and around Reading, bracknell, the UK equivalent of Silicon Valley and that's what I was doing. And then one day an organization called X Open Company came looking for they were experimenting. They were they'd had internal lawyers and external lawyers and they were experimenting with a hybrid. So my firm was asked to bid on a proposal to provide a lawyer for two days a week in the office of X Open Company in Reading and anyway, short version my firm won the bid and I was the individual that was assigned to work two days for X Open Company. And for those who don't know the background of the Open Group company and for those who don't know the background of the open group, ex-open company was a predecessor organization of the open group. It's now known as the UK company, is now known as the open group limited.
Speaker 2:But that's where I started. I joined and, if I'm looking at it from a how do you plan your career point of view, well, I had a plan Go to work in industry for three to five years, get some experience of industry, go back to private practice in the law firm, take, hopefully, the partnership route and that will be my role as a lawyer. And that didn't happen and that didn't happen. So here I am, 30-something years later, after I was going to be there for three to five years, and there are many reasons why that's the case, but that's where I'm at. So I joined as this hybrid version of lawyer, actually still working for the law firm, and then two days became three and then I had the opportunity to join Ex Open Company as their in-house counsel and general counsel and, after a lot of thinking through the pros and cons, decided that I'd regret it if I didn't take the opportunity, and so I joined again as general counsel.
Speaker 2:I was very fortunate that there was a lot of exciting stuff going on at the time, which was really why I felt I needed to join.
Speaker 2:But also the CEO at the time, a gentleman called Jeff Morris, very quickly got me involved in other aspects of the business and invited me to sit in on some of the things that his senior management team were doing strategy, marketing, all the things that were involved and so I got a more rounded view than a lot of those who follow a typical legal education. And then this really is about the Open Group history. In a sense, x-open Company Limited was put together with the Open Software Foundation both subsidiaries under a new organization called the Open Group LLC, and I followed into that. My job followed into working for that, where I was co-general counsel with my equivalent in the open software foundation and then, as the open group progressed, I became ceo. A change of a change of ceo occurred and alan brown reported, asked me to be chief operating officer, which which I was for many years, as well as being general counsel, until I was appointed by the board in 2015 as the CEO, and I'm still here.
Speaker 3:As you said, that's not the usual route that lawyers take, I suppose, in terms of career journey, no, it's not, it's not the, not the usual route that um lawyers take, I suppose, in terms of career journey, um, it's not the the, the route for the, the idea of trying, uh, trying a few years in industry, as it's known, and getting that experience is quite common, but, uh, most people actually stick to the plan, I suppose, and I didn't.
Speaker 2:And you know I've been asked a few times how come it's 30-something years instead of three to five, and the answer is I said at the time, I will carry on doing this while I'm learning something and enjoying it. And that's still true every day. Obviously, there are things that we don't enjoy about all of our jobs, but I love the role that I have.
Speaker 3:It's an honour to be the CEO now of the Open Group and I learn something new every day, whether I want to or not, but I do something new every day, whether, whether I want to or not, but I do, and so standards was the standards ever something you ever expected to be involved with? Obviously, you mentioned that you were involved with copyright law, and did standards ever come up before the open group or ex-open company?
Speaker 2:No, not really. Not really. I was focused. I mean, I worked for a firm that was a commercial law firm, so I was mostly doing general commercial law work, bits of bits of everything mergers and acquisitions and all sorts of things but the intellectual property side was where I went and you could say that there's an element of that in the work that I did. It was copyright and trademarks primarily, and they're both aimed in some ways at protecting innovation and, and, uh, protecting investment.
Speaker 2:There's a kind of a slight um faint, uh lead into standards on that, but but actually it was very much due to a specific standard that that got me to join, uh, the open group and that was, uh, the unix standard, which at the time wasn't actually a standard.
Speaker 2:It was what was happening, and this was in 1993.
Speaker 2:What was happening was UNIX was basically a code base, a software code base. It wasn't standardized and it was being transferred to, as it happened, it was being transferred to XOpen, therefore the Open Group, and what we did and the intent of those transferring it, which was an organization called Novell, the intent was that we would build a standard around it so that we would transform what it meant to use Unix code from being derived from a certain software code base to being conformant with a standard. And that's exactly what we did, originally called spec 1170 and now called the Single Unix Specification, and it was at that point dealing with all the trademarks, a very widely registered trademark around the world 83 countries or something at the time, I think and so there was a lot of intellectual property work to be done in making that transition, and that was one of the things that tempted, tempted me to to join the organization on a permanent basis. So it was. It was that standard, that that that's what became a standard that drew me in.
Speaker 1:And what would you say excites you the most about the future of the Open Group and its initiatives?
Speaker 2:Oh well, I could, I won't, don't worry, but I could talk for ages on this, ash.
Speaker 2:There is so much that so much potential for the Open Group because what we do is we bring people together to work on standards.
Speaker 2:We bring users of technology together with those who produce technology products and we are able to do this and have shown over the last decade plus that we can do this in many different industries.
Speaker 2:That's the real exciting part and the potential for this. So just, I mean everything from education to telecommunications to the energy industry is an industry we've done a lot of work in recently Federal avionics in the US, large-scale process automation systems. There's all sorts of industries and the common thread is we can get involved and really make a difference, and I'm not just saying that as proud CEO. Our standards really make a difference in these industries when there is a business need that can be solved or helped by the adoption of open standards, and there are so many. As I say, we've done many industries so far and there's so much potential for the future because I think, as the world in some ways gets smaller with globalization, the potential for standards on a global basis is so important that I suspect we'll get involved in many more different industries in the coming years, suspect we'll get involved in many more different industries in the coming years.
Speaker 3:Thank you. So now let's dive into today's episode. So, as the title suggests, we're celebrating World Standards Day. For those of you who might not know what it is each year, on October 14th, a standards organisation celebrates World Standards Day, which focuses on paying tribute to the collaborative efforts of thousands of experts worldwide who develop the voluntary technical agreements that are published as international standards. So, steve, as CEO of a standards organisation, can you describe the importance of standards?
Speaker 2:Yes, another one I could talk for a long time at, but to try and put it in simple, everyday terms, try imagining the world without standards is how I'd begin to answer that. If you think about it, everything from electricity, for example, to how our phones work, to the quality standards that there are that help ensure our safety and the efficiency of products, the standards in healthcare, the standards around the use of personal information standards are absolutely everywhere and without them we'd be a bit stuck. And just as a great way of demonstrating this I don't have the exact reference, but it was in either October or November last year, october or November 2023, a well-known TV show been going for years in the US called Saturday Night Live, a comedy sketch show. They did a sketch called Washington's Dream, which was about standards. It was specifically about weights and measures and how the new United States nation would set its weights and measures and standards. It's well worth the viewing. It's very funny and it does identify some of the issues that you'd have without standards.
Speaker 2:But just think about it from an everyday point of view. You plug something into the wall and, although the sockets may be different shapes in different parts of the world and the current might be different. You plug something in and you don't think about it. It's just going to work most of the time, and that's part of the role of standards in everyday life. That's part of the role of standards in everyday life and I think it's at the point where people just don't think about them. They just assume that things are going to work, and that's because the people who create standards have done a great job of doing that, and then the organizations that build products to those standards make it seamless for all of us.
Speaker 1:And how would you say standards influence the world of technology.
Speaker 2:Well, again, I mean some of what I said is related to technology, but I think, specifically If we think about how technology has evolved new technology is created all the time with the innovative minds that there are in the world or product that implements that technology needs to have a standard around it, because otherwise you simply won't make the most of that innovation in the world, because you'll only ever be dealing with products from one particular manufacturer, maybe the one that came up with the technology in the first place. So the usual pattern is something new will come up and there'll be a market leader or maybe one or two of those who will be the early producers of products around a certain technology, and then many others will follow. And that's when you need the standards in place, because there's a word we use in the standards world called interoperability, basically meaning that products from one manufacturer will need to work with products from another manufacturer so that our lives as individuals or as organisations are simpler, because this stuff just works. And if you think of some of the challenges that we hear every day with people with phone chargers that are different and tables that are different, they're examples of where there are standards but they're not quite unified yet or uniform, and that's the kind of challenge that we get when that's when that's the case, but without standards in technology, then we've never reached the true potential of their, of the technology.
Speaker 2:And you know, I think an often an often or not much talked about aspect of standards is the safety element, all of these things I've talked about how easy, how easy it is to plug things in and it just goes, or that. You know it has to be that there are. There are many, many standards, standards around the safety aspects of, obviously, electricity and many other things, airplanes, whatever it is that you might be talking about. There are many issues around that keep us safe when we are using everyday products. So the safety angle is very important as well, I think.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you mentioned the healthcare industry and we had a guest on previously. He used to work for the world health organization. Yeah, and yeah, it would be uh hard to imagine a healthcare world without standards, oh, absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And and you know getting into what do we mean by standards, if you think about it. One aspect of that is standards actually provide us with a common language. That's a really important aspect. That is relevant to healthcare. It's relevant to any other field really relevant to healthcare. It's relevant to any other field really. The standardization around terms and what they mean is so important because everyone's on the same page.
Speaker 2:You don't have to explain what you're doing, and this is something that a little shameless plug for the open group, but one of our best known standards is the TOGAF standard in enterprise architecture, and one of our best known standards is the, the togaf standard in enterprise architecture, and one of the things we hear consistently as to why this is being so widely adopted by many of the world's largest organizations and every size organization actually is it provides a common language for for people when they are doing architecture work.
Speaker 2:For people when they are doing architecture work, the one term is consistently understood and lots of time is saved and lots of money, therefore, is saved. So I think you know in healthcare to take it back to directly to your question, oliver I think you know if the medical professionals had to spend all their time checking their understanding of what they mean by certain terms, because there were no standards, that they'd be a lot less efficient and fewer lives would be saved yeah, yeah, I agree, this is different for each country in terms of the health care provided, except the language will always be the same.
Speaker 3:So should we go into the open group's role in contribution towards standards? What makes the open group significant, or I should say different, in the development of standards in comparison to other standard organisations?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's an interesting one, because the the other I haven't haven't spoken of this, but there are many different types of standards organizations and many different types of standards. There are the formal standards that you you get from from iso, um at an international level, and you get the uh, the national standards, for example, from from ANSI and NIST in the US and from the BSI in the UK, as examples, etsi in Europe, and they are what are typically known as formal standards organizations. What the open group is is sometimes called an industry standards body, sometimes called an industry consortium, and what we do is we pull together different organizations who are interested in working on standards for one reason or another, one reason or another. It might be because they're on the supply side and they need to know what the direction of standards is going to be in order to plot the lifecycle of their products. Or it may be that on the user side the customer side of things knowing what products are out there that might be available either to help in procurements or for any other purpose on the customer side. But it's all about making stuff work together. It's back to that interoperability question. So I think where the open group is different in that sense is that we're in that, in that category of organizations who who bring together the relevant industry participants to work on standards that are relevant to that industry. And, as I say we can, we can do that same, that same approach, that same set of processes and procedures that we have and have been tried and tested over decades. At this point we can bring that to any business, any industry that is looking to open standards, to provide a way to help solve the business challenges that those industries face.
Speaker 2:Whether that's a couple of examples it sounds like a niche example, but it's one that involves an awful lot of money. In the United States, the suppliers of avionics in other words planes, helicopters, anything that flies, basically suppliers of those to the US government concluded that the way they've typically built things every time they build a new warfighter or a new, a new aircraft of some kind, everything is done from scratch. There's uh, no or very little reuse of prior technologies. The whole thing is very expensive. Therefore, um and uh and takes time, uh and uh, they decided a number of years ago, in fact, it will be 15 years next year, so 15 years in June 25, when we started something called the FACE Consortium and that was aimed at doing things differently reuse, building the next generation of federal avionics systems around open standards that the industry and government participated in the creation of. So you've got the customer input right from the beginning and the supplier input and it just works. And that's a model that we've taken to many other industries since, and it's all about using standards to change the way things are done.
Speaker 2:Or another example where we've had great success and interest in our standards is for digital transformation. That term has been around a while, a while now, but that doesn't mean that anyone's digital transformation journey is finished. It's still very much relevant and ongoing, and standards help provide a roadmap and a checklist for an organization when it's going through its digital transformation journey. And, in fact, one of the things we've tried to do in recent years at the Open Group is pull together some of those relevant standards that you might need at different parts in that journey into something we call the portfolio of open digital standards, just to make using those a bit easier and making them cross-referential, cross-referenceable and that kind of thing. But it's all about solving business problems. That's where we come at it from and I think to your point of where is the open group different.
Speaker 2:I think we're different to many of the more technical standards organizations in that there's a very big business element in what we do. It's business driven, and I think some of the people that are involved in our standards aren't necessarily from the technical side. There are many that are, but, um, we're getting this overlap of technology and business is increasingly important in in the world and we're seeing that in the individuals who create those standards. So not to say that we can't do deep technical standards when we need them, we absolutely do. But it's this business element and this OK, we are creating a standard, how is it going to help? Aspect. We typically nowadays produce business guides that help people use our standards for good, whether are procuring systems and that's a typical one so that, so that those on the customer side can see standards as a useful tool that makes their job easier, rather than another rock to fetch. I guess the clue is in the name for the Open Group.
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely. We're open to any organisation that wants to adhere to the processes and join in working on standards, and there are many different reasons why organizations would want to do that, but we are happy to embrace them all if they, if they are interested in participating.
Speaker 1:And continuing discussions around standards and the future of standards. How do you see standards evolving with the emergence of new technologies, further evolving challenges and opportunities within standardization?
Speaker 2:Well, I think that's one that we're actually challenged by and excited by at the same time at the moment is, you know, technology has been evolving so quickly and in fact, seems to evolve more quickly as the years go by, and, of course, everyone's talking at the moment about AI and what's the impact on that. I said earlier that any new technology at some point needs some standardization. So you can't standardize too early because there's no best practice, there's no standard way of approaching things that anyone can demonstrate works. So you need a little bit of time for that to happen before you get into standards. But yes, we'll need all sorts of standards in AI, partly from a safety point of view, partly from an ethics point of view. They're all important and there'll be others that develop that are just around best practices on how to use, for example, how to use some of these large language models in your everyday job, and what we've identified at the OpenGrip as a starting point where we can bring what are our traditional skill sets and experiences to bear on.
Speaker 2:The challenge here is in the area of professional practice. Certification is an important part of the open group. I haven't spoken about it so far, but certifying individuals, having a way of distinguishing those who have demonstrated their competence in a particular way. When it comes to in this case, when the comes to the use of artificial intelligence having practitioners who are doing things in a consistent way, in a reliable way, in the same way that you might want to have certified practitioners in in other, in other walks of life, whether that's whether that's other walks of life, whether that's whether that's um healthcare or or law, or accountancy or whatever it might be. Not necessarily that we'll get to the, the stage of ai, of having an ai profession as such, although who knows? But um the the we already in the open group work on on professional practice in our Open Professions program, which is really what that does. That's a standard, it's set of standards in its own right that are the standards for what it means to be a practitioner in a particular field, whether that's enterprise, architecture or data science, whatever it might be. So that's where the open group initially sees our our early, earliest involvement in standards to do with ai, and we've had a, a group within our architecture forum that's been working on various aspects of of that to start bringing in now our open professions people.
Speaker 2:So so I think that's one area and back to certification again. There are different types of certification as there are different types of standards. So another thing that we're probably very well known for nowadays, best known for our people certification, so that the actually certifying individuals knowledge of a particular standard, knowledge based certification is. It is very, very popular, very important. We're best known for the TOGAF standard certification program over several versions now, but also we have programs in place for other standards of ours, such as the Archimate modeling language and the IT4IT reference architecture and the OpenFair. There are many. I'll try not to turn in too much of a sales pitch, but the message is knowledge set of knowledge-based certification and professional certification are important aspects of standardization because they standardize the practice.
Speaker 3:It's got to be so tough with how fast new technologies are coming out. It's got to be tough to set standards and be able to keep up with the pace of these emerging technologies.
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely Absolutely, and that, I think, is one of the challenges. You can't do it too early, but if you do it too late then sometimes you get rival camps or rival technologies or approaches, even rival standards. You guys are both too young to remember, but back in the days of videotapes there were basically two standards for those. There was the VHS standard and the Betamax standard and sort of mini standards. Will got fought over those and VHS became the ultimate standard.
Speaker 2:But that's not helpful where there are competing standards, which which leads to, I think, another. Another place that the open group is is different here is that we never try to create a standard that competes with somebody else's standard. There's enough work out there for everyone to do in the standard space, so we quite often will reference existing standards. We call that approach a standard of standards approach, but we will reference existing standards. We call that approach a standard of standards approach, but we will reference other standards that are out there, and then the work that our folks will do is about bringing those standards together, making them usable and working on the glue that holds them together and makes them usable on a day-to-day basis.
Speaker 2:So it is difficult to build standards when the technology is evolving, but I think because the need for it is there and that's a fundamental business problem that organizations have is which direction is a standard going in or which direction is a particular technology going in. That's something you need to get a handle on, and so it's therefore worth their time to invest in the effort it takes to create those standards. So it doesn't happen because somebody loves working on standards for the sake of it. It happens because there's a problem to solve in the business world Right.
Speaker 3:So we've obviously talked about standards a lot today, what they are, how they're made in the open-source perspective. This is all in aid of World Standards Day. So what does World Standards Day mean to you, the Open Group and the Open Group's community?
Speaker 2:Well, I think for us, we try to acknowledge the efforts of our members and the individuals within those member organisations along the way, because there's a lot of work goes into standards.
Speaker 2:But I think what World Standards Day does is it helps us pause for a moment to recognise those involved in the putting together of these standards, and it's worth remembering that very few people have a job that is creating standards or working on standards.
Speaker 2:Much of the work that goes on inside the Open Group and I know many other organizations is done by individuals who have day jobs, and so they end up spending a lot of their personal time or weekends or whatever working on this because they see it as important or their organization sees it as important and they want to put the extra effort in to help that organization. So, for me, any day that acknowledges the role of standards and particularly, I think, the individuals that create those standards, that's how I see the greatest importance of it, and it's something that we will, as I I say we try to do at the open group. I think we do a pretty good job as well, whether it's individual recognition or organizational recognition, but when there's a global day for doing this, I think that's a great thing and anything that can get standards into the minds of the public for a short while and they think, oh yeah, I never thought about that before. That's how they're done, so I think it's great to market.
Speaker 1:Finally, how can organizations get involved in celebrating and promoting standards and also how can people learn more about standards and the open group? Are there any upcoming events coming up?
Speaker 2:thank you, yes, well, we consistently run run events at the open group I. We do actually have one coming up later this month. It's one of our summits, the Open Group summits, and we're holding it in Houston, texas, right at the end of this month and the theme of that one is from ideation through innovation into implementation, and I think that's really a great theme for the journey of standards. We talk about career journeys on your show a lot. I know this is sort of a standards journey because somebody has an idea and innovates and then implements and the standards are needed along the way. So we'll be exploring at that event some of the work that's going on in different industries and we have some industry awareness days about that work. We also have our member meetings, so the members of our different forums will be doing some of the hard work that they do to continue their work on standards. We'll have a sort of day of conference style day, I suppose, on the first day, and that's an opportunity for people to experience what we do at the Open Group, I'd say in terms of more general understanding. Then, obviously, our website, opengrouporg, is a great place to go to describe what we do in some of the areas that we operate in. But the standards world, as I said, is broader than us and so there are many, many different standards organizations out there. I mentioned some earlier in the broadcast, but the International Standards Organization, iso, is known for standards in all sorts of areas and they've already developed some AI-related standards, know professional practice standards. So, um, if, if anyone has an interest in standards, then there's a lot out there that you can. You can find.
Speaker 2:Um, I think I'd make a um, another shameless plug as well. We, we have um a few we, we have a series, we, we, well, we have this series of podcasts, of course, that not necessarily talking about standards all the time, but talks about some of the people most of your audience are from, from what I've heard from organizations or individuals who have played some role in, uh, in the standards world. Um, but also we have something called toolkit tuesday, which, uh, we. But also we have something called Toolkit Tuesday, which we stopped doing for a little while but came back to my popular demand, where we focus on standards in a particular area for 30 minutes. It's easy enough to do and if you register it's free, and if you register then you get access to the recording. You can watch it at your leisure.
Speaker 2:That's another way of finding out about things in in the open group, um, but, yeah, come along to an event. Um, we also have virtual events during the year, um, so, um, yeah, see, see what's see what's of interest to you, and, and get involved. That's the key. And if you're, uh, I come across people quite regularly who don't realize that their organizations, their employing organizations, are actually already members of the open group and they could participate if they wanted to. So that's always worth checking as well.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, get involved. If there's a business problem to solve that you think might be best solved by working with others in your industry, that's, that's the way to do it. And, um, uh, for us I think I mentioned certification is key because, um, you know, that's another way that people experience standards, I suppose. But, but it's important because certification programs, whether it's for people or products, they give the standards some teeth, they give them meaning, they make them real. And we have a tagline at the Open Group that we've had for years, called Making Standards Work, and I'd like to think that's what we do Perfect Well.
Speaker 1:thank you, stephen, for joining us on the open comments podcast. It's been great learning more about the world standards day, the future of standards and lots more good stuff. Thank you to our listeners, the open comments community, who have been tuning into the podcast. Until next time, stay safe and happy listening.
